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Live from Brohemian Grove 4 in Wildwood, this Conspiracy Round Table brings together Christian content creators, conspiracy researchers, podcasters, and Biblical worldview thinkers for a wide-ranging discussion on spiritual warfare, New Age deception, Flat Earth, the Mandela Effect, dispensationalism, demonic encounters, institutional distrust, and the supernatural worldview of the Bible. The first panel features Ben of End of the World News, Steven of The Biblical Hitmen, Brad Lail of The Awakened Podcast, and Bennett of Broadcasting Seeds. The conversation begins with the state of modern Christianity and the difference between institutional religion and genuine Christian community. The panel discusses coming to faith from atheism and agnosticism, the work of Dr. Michael Heiser, near-death experiences, sleep paralysis, demonic oppression, spiritual warfare, and why many churches rarely address the supernatural reality described throughout Scripture.The discussion then turns toward New Age spirituality, starseeds, synchronicities, Theosophy, Helena Blavatsky, Alice Bailey, Pleiadians, reptilians, Mystery Babylon, and the idea of an coming alien deception. The panel examines why conspiracy research without Jesus Christ can become another rabbit hole—and why Christ must remain the foundation. The second round table brings in Seth Kicklighter, Bill and Ted of Phone Booth Podcast, Ben of Ben Is the Menace, and Andrew Clinton of the 6G Agenda. Seth discusses astral projection, remote viewing, Robert Monroe, higher-self encounters, Gnosticism, and whether spiritual entities can manufacture seemingly supernatural experiences.Then things get heated with Flat Earth, NASA, Biblical cosmology, the Mandela Effect, Big Bang theory, evolution, panspermia, institutional propaganda, psychological operations, and the erosion of trust in Western institutions. The panel also tackles John Nelson Darby and dispensationalism, including the pre-tribulation rapture, Daniel's 70th week, the seven-year tribulation, the millennial kingdom, Israel, animal sacrifices, and the relationship between the Old Covenant and Christ's final sacrifice.Through all the disagreements, the central message remains the same: secondary conspiracy theories should never divide Christians who are united in Jesus Christ.What part of this round table challenged your worldview the most? Drop your thoughts in the comments.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/nephilim-death-squad--6389018/support.☠️ Nephilim Death Squad — New episodes 5x/week.Join our Patreon for early access, bonus shows & the private Telegram hive.Subscribe on YouTube & Rumble, follow @NephilimDSquad on X/Instagram, grab merch at toplobsta.com. Questions/bookings: chroniclesnds@gmail.com — Stay dangerous.
Bee scientist Kit Prendergast joins the show to talk about... well... the birds and the bees. Plus, Rachel explains how portobello (portabella?) mushrooms are not exactly real. And Sara Kiley tells us how a spotted lanternfly's worst enemy could be a normal dog. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories! Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn Link to all of Jess' content: https://www.jesscapricorn.com/ -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at https://MINTMOBILE.com/weirdest Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Január 19-e a Blue Monday, az év legszomorúbb napja, mit tehetünk a szorongás leküzdésére, ebben ad tanácsokat Benis Ari kineziológus.
Rosewater was one of our most anticipated adventure games of the last few years and as a result we have spoken quite a bit about it from the cast and release date being revealed by Francisco Gonzalez himself and our in depth review earlier this year. However another part of the game that deserves to be spoken about in detail is the music so Mark Benis, the composer of the game, joined Seoirse to talk about how he composed the music, what other musicians he collaborated with, what instruments he used and much much more!Mark Benis Bandcamp SiteRosewater Official SiteAdventure Games Podcast Official SiteIf you would like to stay up to date make sure you subscribe to the podcast. You can subscribe and listen to this podcast on Itunes and Spotify and all other major Podcast Platforms! You can also subscribe to our Youtube channel for extra video content such as video reviews, video interviews, trailers and gameplay.You can also support the podcast at our PatreonYou can review this podcast here:https://ratethispodcast.com/adventuregamespodcastYou can also find this podcast on our social media below:DiscordBlueskyInstagramYou can also find the RSS feed here:http://www.adventuregamespodcast.com/podcast?format=rssLogo created by Siobhan. You can find her on Twitter and InstagramMusic is Speedy Delta (ID 917) by Lobo Loco and can be found here:http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lobo_Loco/Welcome/Speedy_Delta_ID_917_1724
We're back this week talking about our trip to Michigan for NASCAR, Kaitlyn has updates on all the drama from the Karen Read trial, we have a ton of reviews including some live ones, and then we discuss our Top 5 favorite dips of all time!
Patrick opens with some Taco Tuesday fun and shares a personal story about his grandson’s confirmation before shifting to thoughtful listener questions about purgatory, confession, and Catholic teachings on the afterlife. Patrick shares that he was at his grandson’s confirmation last night (00:35) Denise (email) – Can a soul go from purgatory to hell? (02:39) Chase - I just wanted to thank you. (09:04) Ben - Is it proper to bow when Mary is mentioned in Mass. How can I give my friend a push to go to confession? (23:15) Jacob - Does a nonresistant nonbeliever exist? Can someone want to know God but not be able to find him? (38:07) Renee - Gospel of Luke. How come Mary and Zechariah both questioned angel and Zechariah was unable to speak but not Mary? (45:28)
I am joined by Mark Benis, who has composed the musical soundtrack for the point and click adventure game Rosewater, set in the wild west and released in 2024. Mark has also worked on the soundtrack for Lamplight City with others credits for titles including Wolfenstein: Youngblood. In this podcast, we discuss his joy of retro chip-tune music of retro gaming platforms including the Nintendo Game Boy, which has inspired his journey creativity to now write musical soundtracks for modern gaming titles. Topics include: Mark Benis’ opportunity to become a game composer Childhood love of Pokémon Red/Blue music led to a lifelong curiosity about chip music The beauty of 8-bit music to orchestral and back again Using Wwyse and FMOD as audio middleware to replace line-by-line coding Mark’s early days and the audio equipment he used The financial barrier of the many professional audio sample libraries No woodwinds in the game Lamplight City inspiring creativity by limitation How hardware MIDI modules (Roland MT-32, Sound Canvas etc) have been replaced with software music audio libraries Mark’s go to piano performances to loosen his fingers and inspire his thoughts Mark’s computer and desk setup for music composition What is Rosewater and the musical brief you were given Avoiding the typical wild west country style music How much of the original work made it into the game soundtrack? How much of the artwork and game direction did Mark see before composing the tracks? Timing introductions to the music, or arranging the music to the intro? Hearing the voice acting dialogue for the first time reactions Mixing virtual instruments with live music players Choral music creation for the game Lamplight City recorded in a church with a real choir Mark’s future projects Collaborating on musical projects and avoiding arguments Featured music within the podcast, kindly provided with permission by Mark Benis… 7-43 to Rosewater Once Upon a Time in Western Vespuccia Night Walk The Showdown So Long, Partner Flor Silvestre by Christiane Ramirez You can download the full Rosewater Soundtrack on Mark Benis’ Bandcamp page. The full transcript can also be downloaded… SUBSCRIBE TO THE SHOW: Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Deezer | Pocket Casts | RSS | Spotify | YouTube Music | YouTube SUPPORT THE SHOW: Donate to the Game & Gadget Podcast & Pixel RefreshSUBMIT QUESTIONS FOR THE SHOW: Submit a question for the Game & Gadget PodcastFIND OUT MORE: What is the Game & Gadget Podcast WEBSITE: Pixel Refresh – Gaming, Gadgets & Tech both Retro & ModernEMAIL SUBSCRIBE: Latest Articles / Reviews via EmailPIXEL REFRESH YOUTUBE CHANNEL: Pixel Refresh on YouTubeFREE GAME SOUNDTRACKS: ScummVM Music Enhancement Project Original post link: Video Game Music with Rosewater’s Mark Benis – Game & Gadget Podcast #40, created by James Woodcock. For even more content, visit Pixel Refresh - Gaming & Tech | Retro & Modern. Original post link: Video Game Music with Rosewater’s Mark Benis – Game & Gadget Podcast #40, created by James Woodcock. For even more content, visit Pixel Refresh - Gaming & Tech | Retro & Modern.
Beni Rambert und Duri Bonin sprechen über den Fall Walter Stürm – den legendären ‘Ausbrecherkönig'. Stürm wurde in den 1980er-Jahren durch acht spektakuläre Gefängnisausbrüche bekannt. Doch er war mehr als nur ein Krimineller: Mit scharfer Kritik am Justizsystem wurde er zur Symbolfigur des Widerstands gegen die Strafjustiz. Er sagte einmal: «Ich will keinen Anwalt, der sich mit der Justiz arrangiert.» Duri fragt Beni: Was meinte Stürm mit dieser Aussage? War Beni unter diesem Blickwinkel der richtige Anwalt für ihn? Wie war das persönliche Verhältnis zwischen den beiden – und hat sich das nach Benis eigener Inhaftierung verändert? Welche Lehren können heutige Strafverteidiger aus dem Fall Stürm ziehen? Ein weiterer prominenter Fall von Beni ist der Umweltaktivist Marco Camenisch. In den 1980er-Jahren wurde er wegen Sabotageakten und des Mordes an einem Grenzwächter verurteilt. Im Film vertritt Beni die Auffassung, dass es in diesem Fall zu einem Freispruch hätte kommen sollen. Warum? Wie sieht er die Rolle des politischen Aktivismus in Strafprozessen? Im Film [SUSPEKT](https://www.riffraff-houdini.ch/de-ch/film/suspekt.html) sagt Beni: «Viele Kämpfe sind vergebens, aber nie sinnlos.» Duri als Sätzesammler möchte natürlich wissen: Von wem stammt dieses Zitat? Ebenfalls konfrontiert er seinen Gast mit dem Satz «Ich will nicht als Arschloch sterben.» Was bedeuten diese Sätze für Beni? – Ein spannender Podcast für Juristinnen, Aktivisten, True-Crime-Fans oder einfach Menschen, die hinter die Kulissen berühmter Fälle blicken wollen. Es ist ein Gespräch über Strafverteidigung, Widerstand und die Frage, was bleibt, wenn der Kampf vorbei ist. Als Strafverteidiger erhält man Einblicke in die unglaublichsten Fälle und arbeitet eng mit sehr unterschiedlichen und spannenden Menschen zusammen. Im Podcast [Auf dem Weg als Anwält:in](https://www.duribonin.ch/podcast) versucht der Anwalt [Duri Bonin](https://www.duribonin.ch) gemeinsam mit seinen Gesprächspartnern (Beschuldigte, Verurteilte, Staatsanwälte, Strafverteidiger, Gutachter, Opfer, Unschuldige, Schuldige …) zu ergründen, wie diese ticken, was sie antreibt und wie sie das Rechtssystem erleben. Behandelt werden urmenschliche Themen. Bei genauerem Hinsehen findet man Antworten auf eigene Fragen des Lebens und der Gesellschaft. Links zu diesem Podcast: - Anwaltskanzlei von [Duri Bonin](https://www.duribonin.ch) - Titelbild [bydanay](https://www.instagram.com/bydanay/) - Das Buch zum Podcast: [In schwierigem Gelände — Gespräche über Strafverfolgung, Strafverteidigung & Urteilsfindung](https://www.duribonin.ch/shop/) Die Podcasts "Auf dem Weg als Anwält:in" sind unter https://www.duribonin.ch/podcast/ oder auf allen üblichen Plattformen zu hören
But have you heard of pigbutt...worm?
Podcast Méditer l'Évangile, le Psaume ou la Lecture du jour en audio ¦ Prie en chemin
En ce temps de l'Avent, nous avançons vers Noël dans une démarche de combattants d'espérance avec Jésus. Cette semaine, notre part de combat c'est d'être davantage disponible pour rencontrer Dieu. Aujourd'hui nous sommes le mercredi 4 décembre.Avant de démarrer cette prière, je me rends disponible pour rencontrer le Seigneur. Je respire profondément pour accéder à mon silence intérieur, là où Dieu m'attend. Je me présente devant lui. Dans le passage du livre du prophète Isaïe que nous allons prier aujourd'hui, tout combat est terminé et notre espérance trouve son accomplissement. Je demande à l'Esprit Saint de me faire entendre cette promesse et de faire grandir... Chaque jour, retrouvez 12 minutes une méditation guidée pour prier avec un texte de la messe ! A retrouver sur l'application et le site www.prieenchemin.org. Musiques : Musique de Noël instrumentale de Romantique musique interprété par - Musique de Noël instrumentale © Creative Commons Youtube Audio Library ; Benis le Seigneur, ô mon âme - Psaume 102 de Fraternités monastiques de Jérusalem interprété par Fraternités monastiques de Jérusalem - Cantate Jérusalem © ADF-Bayard Musique.
It's YOUR time to #EdUp This EdUp Mini Series, "The Currency of Change", wraps up with episode 6: "From Podcast to Practice - Applying Professional Learnings" YOUR hosts are Andy Benis, Chief of Staff at Los Angeles Pacific University & Dr. Jamie Brownlee-Turgeon, Vice Provost of Operations, Graduate and Professional Studies at Point Loma Nazarene University. Listen in to #EdUp! Want to accelerate YOUR professional development? Want to get exclusive early access to ad-free episodes, extended episodes, bonus episodes, original content, invites to special events, & more? Want to get all this while helping to sustain EdUp, for only $2.99 a month? Then subscribe today to lock in YOUR $2.99/m life long founders rate! This offer will end on December 31, 2024! BECOME A SUBSCRIBER TODAY! Thank YOU so much for tuning in. Join us on the next episode for YOUR time to EdUp! Connect with YOUR EdUp Team - Elvin Freytes & Dr. Joe Sallustio ● Join YOUR EdUp community at The EdUp Experience! We make education YOUR business!
We welcome Alexandros & Christophoros to the show! They are the founders of To Kinima Tou Ethnous, a Greek Diaspora organization that seeks to leverage Greece's greatest natural resource, its people, to influence Greek politics and involve the diaspora in the political process of Greece. Alexandros is a leading voice of Greek Diaspora politics and a practicing Orthodox Christian. He studies political science and Russian language at Southern Methodist University. He has always been politically minded and excels at public speaking and Greek Diaspora outreach, regularly attending Greek heritage and church events in Dallas, TX and in his hometown of Seattle, WA. Benis founded KTE in January 2024 in response to the massive political and cultural upheaval being experienced in Greece and hopes to bring his project to willing and able Greeks living abroad to return the nation of his ancestors to its once and future glory. Christophoros is a former editor-in-chief of his college newspaper and studied Greek history and language at Loyola Marymount University before taking over all media responsibilities for KTE in the summer of 2024. Despite being Alexandros' older brother, Christophoros believes Alexandros is a greater thinker and public speaker for what KTE intends to achieve, which is a return to traditionalism and Orthodox spirituality for the betterment of Greek society. Christophoros currently runs KTE's social media channels and edits all articles and press releases seen on the website. Check out their website: https://www.kinimatouethnous.com/ See more on GreekAF!
It's YOUR time to #EdUp This episode continues the EdUp Mini Series, "The Currency of Change", part 5, YOUR hosts are Dr. Jamie Brownlee-Turgeon, Vice Provost of Operations, Graduate and Professional Studies at Point Loma Nazarene University & Andy Benis, Chief of Staff at Los Angeles Pacific University. Today's special guest is Dr. Ryan Hartwig, Provost at Vanguard University. Listen in to #EdUp! Want to accelerate YOUR professional development? Want to get exclusive early access to ad-free episodes, extended episodes, bonus episodes, original content, invites to special events, & more? Want to get all this while helping to sustain EdUp, for only $2.99 a month? Then subscribe today to lock in YOUR $2.99/m life long founders rate! This offer will end on December 31, 2024! BECOME A SUBSCRIBER TODAY! Thank YOU so much for tuning in. Join us on the next episode for YOUR time to EdUp! Connect with YOUR EdUp Team - Elvin Freytes & Dr. Joe Sallustio ● Join YOUR EdUp community at The EdUp Experience! We make education YOUR business!
Avez-vous déjà imaginé partir en voyage avec votre cheval ? Après 24 ans de monitorat à gérer sa ferme équestre et pédogogique, Gwenola Duplenne-Benis a décidé de se lancer. Elle a acheté deux poulains welsh, Lewis et Looping, qu'elle prépare pour ces périples. Elle raconte au micro de Pour mon cheval les étapes de ce travail.Pour mon cheval est un podcast sur le bien-être équin à destination des propriétaires et passionné(e)s. Suivez-nous sur Instagram pour ne rien rater
For the first time since 2019 Hollywood and Chicago royalty Mike James joins Steed and Jrad. On this Chubstep the guys discuss what has happened to the world since Mike was last on, getting hate comments on YouTube, itch mites going on a feeding spree, the most luxurious animals to get bit from, how Jrad turned a graffiti on his car in Martha's Vineyard into a potential island sensation, Steed's new glasses that make him look like Jeffrey Dahmer, Mike's tarot card reading of the Chicago Bears past, present, and future, why the navy needs new uniforms, why everyone needs to become a Chicago Hounds rugby fan, and having a sexy white noise option on YouTube.
My guest today is an accomplished hybrid athlete and coach Alec Blenis. Want to run far and fast and be strong, muscular, and resilient? Then get pointed in the right direction by avoiding these 5 most common mistakes in hybrid training. Pick up a copy of Aerobic Bodybuilder at functional-bodybuilding.com/ebooks
It's YOUR time to #EdUp This EdUp Mini Series, "The Currency of Change", continues with episode 4: "Pulling On The Same End of the Rope" YOUR hosts are Dr. Jamie Brownlee-Turgeon, Vice Provost of Operations, Graduate and Professional Studies at Point Loma Nazarene University & Andy Benis, Associate VP of Marketing and Interim VP of Enrollment at Los Angeles Pacific University. Listen in to #EdUp! Thank YOU so much for tuning in. Join us on the next episode for YOUR time to EdUp! Connect with YOUR #EdUp Team - Elvin Freytes & Dr. Joe Sallustio ● Join YOUR #EdUp community at The EdUp Experience! We make education YOUR business!
It's YOUR time to #EdUp This episode continues the EdUp Mini Series, "The Currency of Change", part 3, YOUR guest is Dr. Frank Rojas, VP Enrollment, Bay Path University YOUR hosts are Dr. Jamie Brownlee-Turgeon, Vice Provost of Operations, Graduate and Professional Studies at Point Loma Nazarene University & Andy Benis, Associate VP of Marketing and Interim VP of Enrollment at Los Angeles Pacific University. Listen in to #EdUp! Thank YOU so much for tuning in. Join us on the next episode for YOUR time to EdUp! Connect with YOUR EdUp Team - Elvin Freytes & Dr. Joe Sallustio ● Join YOUR EdUp community at The EdUp Experience! ● Support EdUp at The EdUp Merch Experience! We make education YOUR business! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/edup/message
Send us a Text Message.I'm back, and this time I'm flying solo. Listen for a fresh take on pop-culture from the perspective of a very opinioned lawyer (that's me).Alec Baldwin and Hilaria launch new reality show: is it exploitation of children to pay Alec's legal bills?Vanderpump Rules is on the chopping block: The producers should be ashamed of themselves.The demise of JLO and Ben: Is the fame drug too tempting? Should Ben defend Jen against the internet trolls? Harrison Butker loves homemakers: Is he judging or celebrating women?Jennie Garth and her ex-husband Peter Facinelli have a heartbreaking conversation about their divorce.Kelly Osbourne comes for Giuliana Rancic for no good reason: is Kelly a hypocrite?Nepotism in Hollywood a la Kate Hudson: Is it a good or bad thing?
It's YOUR time to #EdUp This episode begins a new EdUp Mini Series, "The Currency of Change", with part 2 YOUR hosts are Dr. Jamie Brownlee-Turgeon, Vice Provost of Operations, Graduate and Professional Studies at Point Loma Nazarene University & Andy Benis, Associate VP of Marketing and Interim VP of Enrollment at Los Angeles Pacific University. Listen in to #EdUp! Thank YOU so much for tuning in. Join us on the next episode for YOUR time to EdUp! Connect with YOUR EdUp Team - Elvin Freytes & Dr. Joe Sallustio ● Join YOUR EdUp community at The EdUp Experience! ● Support EdUp at The EdUp Merch Experience! We make education YOUR business! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/edup/message
Belle isn't sure about the shitty idea wheel, Ben IS sure about the shitty idea wheel, and Liam visits Canberra. Quote of the show: "Lake Burley Griffin and other bodies of water in Canbera" Running order: Dude who won a million bucks calls through! Donald Trump calls the show to talk his new biopic Serious injury, silly reason: Belle's ripped her ass Lots of stuff coming up! The new ad for the best city in Australia... “Canberra” The shitty idea wheel: Oi whaddya got there? More serious injury, silly reason calls Longest goooooal: Sally holds her throne Listen Live on the Nova Payer Follow us on Instagram - TikTok - FacebookSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
It's YOUR time to #EdUp This episode begins a new EdUp Mini Series, "The Currency of Change", with part 1: "But We've Always Done It This Way". YOUR hosts are Dr. Jamie Brownlee-Turgeon, Vice Provost of Operations, Graduate and Professional Studies at Point Loma Nazarene University & Andy Benis, Associate VP of Marketing and Interim VP of Enrollment at Los Angeles Pacific University. How can higher education institutions move beyond the mindset of "we've always done it this way" to adapt to the rapidly evolving needs & expectations of today's learners? What are some of the faulty assumptions & old ways of thinking that are holding institutions back from necessary change & transformation? How is the changing student demographic & the questioning of the value of higher education creating an existential crisis for the industry as a whole? What role does institutional leadership play in facilitating honest conversations about the challenges ahead & collaborating across silos to develop solutions? From personalized learning powered by AI to diversifying program modalities, what are some examples of colleges & universities successfully innovating to meet the moment? What can individuals at all levels of an institution do to help shift mindsets, build relationships across departments, & contribute to a culture of continuous improvement? Listen in to #EdUp! Thank YOU so much for tuning in. Join us on the next episode for YOUR time to EdUp! Connect with YOUR EdUp Team - Elvin Freytes & Dr. Joe Sallustio ● Join YOUR EdUp community at The EdUp Experience! ● Support EdUp at The EdUp Merch Experience! We make education YOUR business! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/edup/message
In this week's episode, I tackle your questions regarding image, sex, and dating! From finding love on online dating apps to spicing up your sex life, this episode covers a lot of juicy topics that you won't want to miss. I also include some practical tips to make your dating profile more enticing and ways to improve your image, so enjoy! Please reach out and tell us your thoughts about the Q&A over on Instagram @celestemooreimage and don't forget to rate and review if you love the podcast! In this week's episode we discuss: [02:26] Question 1: (Raul) - What is the biggest misconception about online dating? [04:26] Question 2: (J.C.) - How has the perception of beauty changed with social media? [06:35] Question 3: (Rob) - Can you really find love on online dating apps? [09:13] Question 4: (Joe) - What is the most important aspect of maintaining a healthy relationship? [11:37] Question 5: (Adam) - How can you handle jealousy in a relationship? [13:36] Question 6: (Jimmy) - What is the best advice for someone struggling with their image? [16:01] Question 7: (Ben) - Is monogamy outdated? [17:25] Question 8: (Jared) - How can you spice up your sex life?
It's YOUR time to #EdUp In this episode, recorded LIVE & in person from the InsightsEDU 2024 conference in Phoenix, AZ YOUR guests are Andy Benis, Associate Vice President, Marketing & Outreach, Los Angeles Pacific University, & Dr. Jamie Brownlee-Turgeon, Vice Provost of Operations, Graduate & Professional Studies, Point Loma Nazarene University YOUR host is Dr. Joe Sallustio Listen in to #EdUp! Thank YOU so much for tuning in. Join us on the next episode for YOUR time to EdUp! Connect with YOUR EdUp Team - Elvin Freytes & Dr. Joe Sallustio ● Join YOUR EdUp community at The EdUp Experience! We make education YOUR business! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/edup/message
"A little bit of Jessica here I am. A little bit of you makes me your man." - We discover a spa without bubbles is just an awkward communal bath. - We discuss Nobody's surprising choice for ‘the ultimate man'. - Ben gets compared to Wolverine and we devise a new dating app based tourism campaign. - Ben buys dinner from someone who doesn't understand the concept of ‘buy two get one free' and Nobody outlays the girl math of buying tennis lessons. - Nobody details her theory on men only coming in one size. - We dive into the origins of Ben's unfortunate nickname, Benis. - Ben doesn't understand why men and women's shoe sizes are different. - We dispense some advice to a redditor whose girlfriend says everyone's name but his in bed. - We advise a man who sent porn to his friends, family and co-workers. - We help a guy who made his girlfriend have visions during sex.
Hello Ihr Mäuze, Heute wird's spicy… Wir sprechen über Benis dating game und Lenis Beziehung, Sexträume und Eifersucht. Wir hoffen euch hat die Folge gefallen ✨ Abonniert uns gerne auf Instagram @cravingdeepshit.podcast um nichts mehr zu verpassen !
A conversation with Tim Hwang about historical simulations, the interaction of policy and science, analogies between research ecosystems and the economy, and so much more. Topics Historical Simulations Macroscience Macro-metrics for science Long science The interaction between science and policy Creative destruction in research “Regulation” for scientific markets Indicators for the health of a field or science as a whole “Metabolism of Science” Science rotation programs Clock speeds of Regulation vs Clock Speeds of Technology References Macroscience Substack Ada Palmer's Papal Simulation Think Tank Tycoon Universal Paperclips (Paperclip maximizer html game) Pitt Rivers Museum Transcript [00:02:02] Ben: Wait, so tell me more about the historical LARP that you're doing. Oh, [00:02:07] Tim: yeah. So this comes from like something I've been thinking about for a really long time, which is You know in high school, I did model UN and model Congress, and you know, I really I actually, this is still on my to do list is to like look into the back history of like what it was in American history, where we're like, this is going to become an extracurricular, we're going to model the UN, like it has all the vibe of like, after World War II, the UN is a new thing, we got to teach kids about international institutions. Anyways, like, it started as a joke where I was telling my [00:02:35] friend, like, we should have, like, model administrative agency. You know, you should, like, kids should do, like, model EPA. Like, we're gonna do a rulemaking. Kids need to submit. And, like, you know, there'll be Chevron deference and you can challenge the rule. And, like, to do that whole thing. Anyways, it kind of led me down this idea that, like, our, our notion of simulation, particularly for institutions, is, like, Interestingly narrow, right? And particularly when it comes to historical simulation, where like, well we have civil war reenactors, they're kind of like a weird dying breed, but they're there, right? But we don't have like other types of historical reenactments, but like, it might be really valuable and interesting to create communities around that. And so like I was saying before we started recording, is I really want to do one that's a simulation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But like a serious, like you would like a historical reenactment, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's like everybody would really know their characters. You know, if you're McNamara, you really know what your motivations are and your background. And literally a dream would be a weekend simulation where you have three teams. One would be the Kennedy administration. The other would be, you know, Khrushchev [00:03:35] and the Presidium. And the final one would be the, the Cuban government. Yeah. And to really just blow by blow, simulate that entire thing. You know, the players would attempt to not blow up the world, would be the idea. [00:03:46] Ben: I guess that's actually the thing to poke, in contrast to Civil War reenactment. Sure, like you know how [00:03:51] Tim: that's gonna end. Right, [00:03:52] Ben: and it, I think it, that's the difference maybe between, in my head, a simulation and a reenactment, where I could imagine a simulation going [00:04:01] Tim: differently. Sure, right. [00:04:03] Ben: Right, and, and maybe like, is the goal to make sure the same thing happened that did happen, or is the goal to like, act? faithfully to [00:04:14] Tim: the character as possible. Yeah, I think that's right, and I think both are interesting and valuable, right? But I think one of the things I'm really interested in is, you know, I want to simulate all the characters, but like, I think one of the most interesting things reading, like, the historical record is just, like, operating under deep uncertainty about what's even going on, right? Like, for a period of time, the American [00:04:35] government is not even sure what's going on in Cuba, and, like, you know, this whole question of, like, well, do we preemptively bomb Cuba? Do we, we don't even know if the, like, the warheads on the island are active. And I think I would want to create, like, similar uncertainty, because I think that's where, like, that's where the strategic vision comes in, right? That, like, you have the full pressure of, like, Maybe there's bombs on the island. Maybe there's not even bombs on the island, right? And kind of like creating that dynamic. And so I think simulation is where there's a lot, but I think Even reenactment for some of these things is sort of interesting. Like, that we talk a lot about, like, oh, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Or like, the other joke I had was like, we should do the Manhattan Project, but the Manhattan Project as, like, historical reenactment, right? And it's kind of like, you know, we have these, like, very, like off the cuff or kind of, like, stereotype visions of how these historical events occur. And they're very stylized. Yeah, exactly, right. And so the benefit of a reenactment that is really in detail Yeah. is like, oh yeah, there's this one weird moment. You know, like that, that ends up being really revealing historical examples. And so even if [00:05:35] you can't change the outcome, I think there's also a lot of value in just doing the exercise. Yeah. Yeah. The, the thought of [00:05:40] Ben: in order to drive towards this outcome that I know. Actually happened I wouldn't as the character have needed to do X. That's right That's like weird nuanced unintuitive thing, [00:05:50] Tim: right? Right and there's something I think about even building into the game Right, which is at the very beginning the Russians team can make the decision on whether or not they've even actually deployed weapons into the cube at all, yeah, right and so like I love that kind of outcome right which is basically like And I think that's great because like, a lot of this happens on the background of like, we know the history. Yeah. Right? And so I think like, having the team, the US team put under some pressure of uncertainty. Yeah. About like, oh yeah, they could have made the decision at the very beginning of this game that this is all a bluff. Doesn't mean anything. Like it's potentially really interesting and powerful, so. [00:06:22] Ben: One precedent I know for this completely different historical era, but there's a historian, Ada Palmer, who runs [00:06:30] Tim: a simulation of a people election in her class every year. That's so good. [00:06:35] And [00:06:36] Ben: it's, there, you know, like, it is not a simulation. [00:06:40] Tim: Or, [00:06:41] Ben: sorry, excuse me, it is not a reenactment. In the sense that the outcome is indeterminate. [00:06:47] Tim: Like, the students [00:06:48] Ben: can determine the outcome. But... What tends to happen is like structural factors emerge in the sense that there's always a war. Huh. The question is who's on which sides of the war? Right, right. And what do the outcomes of the war actually entail? That's right. Who [00:07:05] Tim: dies? Yeah, yeah. And I [00:07:07] Ben: find that that's it's sort of Gets at the heart of the, the great [00:07:12] Tim: man theory versus the structural forces theory. That's right. Yeah. Like how much can these like structural forces actually be changed? Yeah. And I think that's one of the most interesting parts of the design that I'm thinking about right now is kind of like, what are the things that you want to randomize to impose different types of like structural factors that could have been in that event? Right? Yeah. So like one of the really big parts of the debate at XCOM in the [00:07:35] early phases of the Cuban Missile Crisis is You know, McNamara, who's like, right, he runs the Department of Defense at the time. His point is basically like, look, whether or not you have bombs in Cuba or you have bombs like in Russia, the situation has not changed from a military standpoint. Like you can fire an ICBM. It has exactly the same implications for the U. S. And so his, his basically his argument in the opening phases of the Cuban Missile Crisis is. Yeah. Which is actually pretty interesting, right? Because that's true. But like, Kennedy can't just go to the American people and say, well, we've already had missiles pointed at us. Some more missiles off, you know, the coast of Florida is not going to make a difference. Yeah. And so like that deep politics, and particularly the politics of the Kennedy administration being seen as like weak on communism. Yeah. Is like a huge pressure on all the activity that's going on. And so it's almost kind of interesting thinking about the Cuban Missile Crisis, not as like You know us about to blow up the world because of a truly strategic situation but more because of like the local politics make it so difficult to create like You know situations where both sides can back down [00:08:35] successfully. Basically. Yeah [00:08:36] Ben: The the one other thing that my mind goes to actually to your point about it model UN in schools. Huh, right is Okay, what if? You use this as a pilot, and then you get people to do these [00:08:49] Tim: simulations at [00:08:50] Ben: scale. Huh. And that's actually how we start doing historical counterfactuals. Huh. Where you look at, okay, you know, a thousand schools all did a simulation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In those, you know, 700 of them blew [00:09:05] Tim: up the world. Right, right. [00:09:07] Ben: And it's, it actually, I think it's, That's the closest [00:09:10] Tim: thing you can get to like running the tape again. Yeah. I think that's right. And yeah, so I think it's, I think it's a really underused medium in a lot of ways. And I think particularly as like you know, we just talk, talk like pedagogically, like it's interesting that like, it seems to me that there was a moment in American pedagogical history where like, this is a good way of teaching kids. Like, different types of institutions. And like, but it [00:09:35] hasn't really matured since that point, right? Of course, we live in all sorts of interesting institutions now. And, and under all sorts of different systems that we might really want to simulate. Yeah. And so, yeah, this kind of, at least a whole idea that there's lots of things you could teach if you, we like kind of opened up this way of kind of like, Thinking about kind of like educating for about institutions. Right? So [00:09:54] Ben: that is so cool. Yeah, I'm going to completely, [00:09:59] Tim: Change. Sure. Of course. [00:10:01] Ben: So I guess. And the answer could be no, but is, is there connections between this and your sort of newly launched macroscience [00:10:10] Tim: project? There is and there isn't. Yeah, you know, I think like the whole bid of macroscience which is this project that I'm doing as part of my IFP fellowship. Yeah. Is really the notion that like, okay, we have all these sort of like interesting results that have come out of metascience. That kind of give us like, kind of like the beginnings of a shape of like, okay, this is how science might work and how we might like get progress to happen. And you know, we've got [00:10:35] like a bunch of really compelling hypotheses. Yeah. And I guess my bit has been like, I kind of look at that and I squint and I'm like, we're, we're actually like kind of in the early days of like macro econ, but for science, right? Which is like, okay, well now we have some sense of like the dynamics of how the science thing works. What are the levers that we can start, like, pushing and pulling, and like, what are the dials we could be turning up and turning down? And, and, you know, I think there is this kind of transition that happens in macro econ, which is like, we have these interesting results and hypotheses, but there's almost another... Generation of work that needs to happen into being like, oh, you know, we're gonna have this thing called the interest rate Yeah, and then we have all these ways of manipulating the money supply and like this is a good way of managing like this economy Yeah, right and and I think that's what I'm chasing after with this kind of like sub stack but hopefully the idea is to build it up into like a more coherent kind of framework of ideas about like How do we make science policy work in a way that's better than just like more science now quicker, please? Yeah, right, which is I think we're like [00:11:35] we're very much at at the moment. Yeah, and in particular I'm really interested in the idea of chasing after science almost as like a Dynamic system, right? Which is that like the policy levers that you have You would want to, you know, tune up and tune down, strategically, at certain times, right? And just like the way we think about managing the economy, right? Where you're like, you don't want the economy to overheat. You don't want it to be moving too slow either, right? Like, I am interested in kind of like, those types of dynamics that need to be managed in science writ large. And so that's, that's kind of the intuition of the project. [00:12:04] Ben: Cool. I guess, like, looking at macro, how did we even decide, macro econ, [00:12:14] Tim: how did we even decide that the things that we're measuring are the right things to measure? Right? Like, [00:12:21] Ben: isn't it, it's like kind of a historical contingency that, you know, it's like we care about GDP [00:12:27] Tim: and the interest rate. Yeah. I think that's right. I mean in, in some ways there's a triumph of like. It's a normative triumph, [00:12:35] right, I think is the argument. And you know, I think a lot of people, you hear this argument, and it'll be like, And all econ is made up. But like, I don't actually think that like, that's the direction I'm moving in. It's like, it's true. Like, a lot of the things that we selected are arguably arbitrary. Yeah. Right, like we said, okay, we really value GDP because it's like a very imperfect but rough measure of like the economy, right? Yeah. Or like, oh, we focus on, you know, the money supply, right? And I think there's kind of two interesting things that come out of that. One of them is like, There's this normative question of like, okay, what are the building blocks that we think can really shift the financial economy writ large, right, of which money supply makes sense, right? But then the other one I think which is so interesting is like, there's a need to actually build all these institutions. that actually give you the lever to pull in the first place, right? Like, without a federal reserve, it becomes really hard to do monetary policy. Right. Right? Like, without a notion of, like, fiscal policy, it's really hard to do, like, Keynesian as, like, demand side stuff. Right. Right? And so, like, I think there's another project, which is a [00:13:35] political project, to say... Okay, can we do better than just grants? Like, can we think about this in a more, like, holistic way than simply we give money to the researchers to work on certain types of problems. And so this kind of leads to some of the stuff that I think we've talked about in the past, which is like, you know, so I'm obsessed right now with like, can we influence the time horizon of scientific institutions? Like, imagine for a moment we had a dial where we're like, On average, scientists are going to be thinking about a research agenda which is 10 years from now versus next quarter. Right. Like, and I think like there's, there's benefits and deficits to both of those settings. Yeah. But man, if I don't hope that we have a, a, a government system that allows us to kind of dial that up and dial that down as we need it. Right. Yeah. The, the, [00:14:16] Ben: perhaps, quite like, I guess a question of like where the analogy like holds and breaks down. That I, that I wonder about is, When you're talking about the interest rate for the economy, it kind of makes sense to say [00:14:35] what is the time horizon that we want financial institutions to be thinking on. That's like roughly what the interest rate is for, but it, and maybe this is, this is like, I'm too, [00:14:49] Tim: my note, like I'm too close to the macro, [00:14:51] Ben: but thinking about. The fact that you really want people doing science on like a whole spectrum of timescales. And, and like, this is a ill phrased question, [00:15:06] Tim: but like, I'm just trying to wrap my mind around it. Are you saying basically like, do uniform metrics make sense? Yeah, exactly. For [00:15:12] Ben: like timescale, I guess maybe it's just. is an aggregate thing. [00:15:16] Tim: Is that? That's right. Yeah, I think that's, that's, that's a good critique. And I think, like, again, I think there's definitely ways of taking the metaphor too far. Yeah. But I think one of the things I would say back to that is It's fine to imagine that we might not necessarily have an interest rate for all of science, right? So, like, you could imagine saying, [00:15:35] okay, for grants above a certain size, like, we want to incentivize certain types of activity. For grants below a certain size, we want different types of activity. Right, another way of slicing it is for this class of institutions, we want them to be thinking on these timescales versus those timescales. Yeah. The final one I've been thinking about is another way of slicing it is, let's abstract away institutions and just think about what is the flow of all the experiments that are occurring in a society? Yeah. And are there ways of manipulating, like, the relative timescales there, right? And that's almost like, kind of like a supply based way of looking at it, which is... All science is doing is producing experiments, which is like true macro, right? Like, I'm just like, it's almost offensively simplistic. And then I'm just saying like, okay, well then like, yeah, what are the tools that we have to actually influence that? Yeah, and I think there's lots of things you could think of. Yeah, in my mind. Yeah, absolutely. What are some, what are some that are your thinking of? Yeah, so I think like the two that I've been playing around with right now, one of them is like the idea of like, changing the flow of grants into the system. So, one of the things I wrote about in Microscience just the past week was to think [00:16:35] about, like sort of what I call long science, right? And so the notion here is that, like, if you look across the scientific economy, there's kind of this rough, like, correlation between size of grant and length of grant. Right, where so basically what it means is that like long science is synonymous with big science, right? You're gonna do a big ambitious project. Cool. You need lots and lots and lots of money Yeah and so my kind of like piece just briefly kind of argues like but we have these sort of interesting examples like the You know Like framing a heart study which are basically like low expense taking place over a long period of time and you're like We don't really have a whole lot of grants that have that Yeah. Right? And so the idea is like, could we encourage that? Like imagine if we could just increase the flow of those types of grants, that means we could incentivize more experiments that take place like at low cost over long term. Yeah. Right? Like, you know, and this kind of gets this sort of interesting question is like, okay, so what's the GDP here? Right? Like, or is that a good way of cracking some of the critical problems that we need to crack right now? Right? Yeah. And it's kind of where the normative part gets into [00:17:35] it is like, okay. So. You know, one way of looking at this is the national interest, right? We say, okay, well, we really want to win on AI. We really want to win on, like, bioengineering, right? Are there problems in that space where, like, really long term, really low cost is actually the kind of activity we want to be encouraging? The answer might be no, but I think, like, it's useful for us to have, like, that. Color in our palette of things that we could be doing Yeah. In like shaping the, the dynamics of science. Yeah. Yeah. [00:18:01] Ben: I, I mean, one of the things that I feel like is missing from the the meta science discussion Mm-Hmm. is, is even just, what are those colors? Mm-Hmm. like what, what are the, the different and almost parameters of [00:18:16] Tim: of research. Yeah. Right, right, right. And I think, I don't know, one of the things I've been thinking about, which I'm thinking about writing about at some point, right, is like this, this view is, this view is gonna piss people off in some ways, because where it ultimately goes is this idea that, like, like, the scientist or [00:18:35] science Is like a system that's subject to the government, or subject to a policy maker, or a strategist. Which like, it obviously is, right? But like, I think we have worked very hard to believe that like, The scientific market is its own independent thing, And like, that touching or messing with it is like, a not, not a thing you should do, right? But we already are. True, that's kind of my point of view, yeah exactly. I think we're in some ways like, yeah I know I've been reading a lot about Keynes, I mean it is sort of interesting that it does mirror... Like this kind of like Great Depression era economic thinking, where you're basically like the market takes care of itself, like don't intervene. In fact, intervening is like the worst possible thing you could do because you're only going to make this worse. And look, I think there's like definitely examples of like kind of like command economy science that like don't work. Yes. But like, you know, like I think most mature people who work in economics would say there's some room for like at least like Guiding the system. Right. And like keeping it like in balance is like [00:19:35] a thing that should be attempted and I think it's kind of like the, the, the argument that I'm making here. Yeah. Yeah. I [00:19:41] Ben: mean, I think that's, [00:19:42] Tim: that's like the meta meta thing. Right. Right. Is even [00:19:46] Ben: what, what level of intervention, like, like what are the ways in which you can like usefully intervene and which, and what are the things that are, that are foolish and kind of. crEate the, the, [00:20:01] Tim: Command economy. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Right. Right. And I think like, I think the way through is, is maybe in the way that I'm talking about, right? Which is like, you can imagine lots of bad things happen when you attempt to pick winners, right? Like maybe the policymaker whoever we want to think of that as like, is it the NSF or NIH or whatever? Like, you know, sitting, sitting in their government bureaucracy, right? Like, are they well positioned to make a choice about who's going to be the right solution to a problem? Maybe yes, maybe no. I think we can have a debate about that, right? But I think there's a totally reasonable position, which is they're not in it, so they're not well positioned to make that call. Yeah. [00:20:35] Right? But, are they well positioned to maybe say, like, if we gave them a dial that was like, we want researchers to be thinking about this time horizon versus that time horizon? Like, that's a control that they actually may be well positioned to inform on. Yeah. As an outsider, right? Yeah. Yeah. And some of this I think, like, I don't know, like, the piece I'm working on right now, which will be coming out probably Tuesday or Wednesday, is you know, some of this is also like encouraging creative destruction, right? Which is like, I'm really intrigued by the idea that like academic fields can get so big that they become they impede progress. Yes. Right? And so this is actually a form of like, I like, it's effectively an intellectual antitrust. Yeah. Where you're basically like, Basically, like the, the role of the scientific regulator is to basically say these fields have gotten so big that they are actively reducing our ability to have good dynamism in the marketplace of ideas. And in this case, we will, we will announce new grant policies that attempt to break this up. And I actually think that like, that is pretty spicy for a funder to do. But like actually maybe part of their role and maybe we should normalize that [00:21:35] being part of their role. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. [00:21:37] Ben: I I'm imagining a world where There are, where this, like, sort of the macro science is as divisive as [00:21:47] Tim: macroeconomics. [00:21:48] Ben: Right? Because you have, you have your like, your, your like, hardcore free market people. Yeah. Zero government intervention. Yeah, that's right. No antitrust. No like, you know, like abolish the Fed. Right, right. All of that. Yeah, yeah. And I look forward to the day. When there's there's people who are doing the same thing for research. [00:22:06] Tim: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah when I think that's actually I mean I thought part of a lot of meta science stuff I think is this kind of like interesting tension, which is that like look politically a lot of those people in the space are Pro free market, you know, like they're they're they're liberals in the little L sense. Yeah, like at the same time Like it is true that kind of like laissez faire science Has failed because we have all these examples of like progress slowing down Right? Like, I don't know. Like, I think [00:22:35] that there is actually this interesting tension, which is like, to what degree are we okay with intervening in science to get better outcomes? Yeah. Right? Yeah. Well, as, [00:22:43] Ben: as I, I might put on my hat and say, Yeah, yeah. Maybe, maybe this is, this is me saying true as a fair science has never been tried. Huh, right. Right? Like, that, that, that may be kind of my position. Huh. But anyways, I... And I would argue that, you know, since 1945, we have been, we haven't had laissez faire [00:23:03] Tim: science. Oh, interesting. [00:23:04] Ben: Huh. Right. And so I'm, yeah, I mean, it's like, this is in [00:23:09] Tim: the same way that I think [00:23:11] Ben: a very hard job for macroeconomics is to say, well, like, do we need [00:23:15] Tim: more or less intervention? Yeah. Yeah. [00:23:17] Ben: What is the case there? I think it's the same thing where. You know, a large amount of science funding does come from the government, and the government is opinionated about what sorts of things [00:23:30] Tim: it funds. Yeah, right. Right. And you [00:23:33] Ben: can go really deep into that. [00:23:35] So, so I [00:23:35] Tim: would. Yeah, that's actually interesting. That flips it. It's basically like the current state of science. is right now over regulated, is what you'd say, right? Or, or [00:23:44] Ben: badly regulated. Huh, sure. That is the argument I would say, very concretely, is that it's badly regulated. And, you know, I might almost argue that it is... It's both over and underregulated in the sense that, well, this is, this is my, my whole theory, but like, I think that there, we need like some pockets where it's like much less regulated. Yeah. Right. Where you're, and then some pockets where you're really sort of going to be like, no. You don't get to sort of tune this to whatever your, your project, your program is. Yeah, right, right. You're gonna be working with like [00:24:19] Tim: these people to do this thing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I think there actually is interesting analogies in like the, the kind of like economic regulation, economic governance world. Yeah. Where like the notion is markets generally work well, like it's a great tool. Yeah. Like let it run. [00:24:35] Right. But basically that there are certain failure states that actually require outside intervention. And I think what's kind of interesting in thinking about in like a macro scientific, if you will, context is like, what are those failure states for science? Like, and you could imagine a policy rule, which is the policymaker says, we don't intervene until we see the following signals emerging in a field or in a region. Right. And like, okay, that's, that's the trigger, right? Like we're now in recession mode, you know, like there's enough quarters of this problem of like more papers, but less results. You know, now we have to take action, right? Oh, that's cool. Yeah, yeah. That would be, that would be very interesting. And I think that's like, that's good, because I think like, we end up having to think about like, you know, and again, this is I think why this is a really exciting time, is like MetaScience has produced these really interesting results. Now we're in the mode of like, okay, well, you know, on that policymaker dashboard, Yeah. Right, like what's the meter that we're checking out to basically be like, Are we doing well? Are we doing poorly? Is this going well? Or is this going poorly? Right, like, I think that becomes the next question to like, make this something practicable Yeah. For, for [00:25:35] actual like, Right. Yeah. Yeah. One of my frustrations [00:25:38] Ben: with meta science [00:25:39] Tim: is that it, I [00:25:41] Ben: think is under theorized in the sense that people generally are doing these studies where they look at whatever data they can get. Huh. Right. As opposed to what data should we be looking at? What, what should we be looking for? Yeah. Right. Right. And so, so I would really like to have it sort of be flipped and say, okay, like this At least ideally what we would want to measure maybe there's like imperfect maybe then we find proxies for that Yeah, as opposed to just saying well, like here's what we can measure. It's a proxy for [00:26:17] Tim: okay. That's right, right Yeah, exactly. And I think a part of this is also like I mean, I think it is like Widening the Overton window, which I think like the meta science community has done a good job of is like trying to widen The Overton window of what funders are willing to do. Yeah. Or like what various existing incumbent actors are willing to [00:26:35] do. Because I think one way of getting that data is to run like interesting experiments in this space. Right? Like I think one of the things I'm really obsessed with right now is like, okay, imagine if you could change the overhead rate that universities charge on a national basis. Yeah. Right? Like, what's that do to the flow of money through science? And is that like one dial that's actually like On the shelf, right? Like, we actually have the ability to influence that if we wanted to. Like, is that something we should be running experiments against and seeing what the results are? Yeah, yeah. [00:27:00] Ben: Another would be earmarking. Like, how much money is actually earmarked [00:27:05] Tim: for different things. That's right, yeah, yeah. Like, how easy it is to move money around. That's right, yeah. I heard actually a wild story yesterday about, do you know this whole thing, what's his name? It's apparently a very wealthy donor. That has convinced the state of Washington's legislature to the UW CS department. it's like, it's written into law that there's a flow of money that goes directly to the CS department. I don't think CS departments need more money. I [00:27:35] know, I know, but it's like, this is a really, really kind of interesting, like, outcome. Yeah. Which is like a very clear case of basically just like... Direct subsidy to like, not, not just like a particular topic, but like a particular department, which I think is like interesting experiment. I don't like, I don't know what's been happening there, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Natural, natural experiment. [00:27:50] Ben: Totally. Has anybody written down, I assume the answer is no, but it would be very interesting if someone actually wrote down a list of sort of just all the things you [00:28:00] Tim: could possibly [00:28:00] Ben: want to pay attention to, right? Like, I mean, like. Speaking of CS, it'd be very interesting to see, like, okay, like, what fraction of the people who, like, get PhDs in an area, stay in this area, right? Like, going back to the, the [00:28:15] Tim: health of a field or something, right? Yeah, yeah. I think that's right. I, yeah. And I think that those, those types of indicators are interesting. And then I think also, I mean, in the spirit of like it being a dynamic system. Like, so a few years back I read this great bio by Sebastian Malaby called The Man Who Knew, which is, it's a bio of Alan Greenspan. So if you want to ever read, like, 800 pages about [00:28:35] Alan Greenspan, book for you. It's very good. But one of the most interesting parts about it is that, like, there's a battle when Alan Greenspan becomes head of the Fed, where basically he's, like, extremely old school. Like, what he wants to do is he literally wants to look at, like, Reams of data from like the steel industry. Yeah, because that's kind of got his start And he basically is at war with a bunch of kind of like career People at the Fed who much more rely on like statistical models for predicting the economy And I think what's really interesting is that like for a period of time actually Alan Greenspan has the edge Because he's able to realize really early on that like there's It's just changes actually in like the metabolism of the economy that mean that what it means to raise the interest rate or lower the interest rate has like very different effects than it did like 20 years ago before it got started. Yeah. And I think that's actually something that I'm also really quite interested in science is basically like When we say science, people often imagine, like, this kind of, like, amorphous blob. But, like, I think the metabolism is changing all the [00:29:35] time. And so, like, what we mean by science now means very different from, like, what we mean by science, like, even, like, 10 to 20 years ago. Yes. And, like, it also means that all of our tactics need to keep up with that change, right? And so, one of the things I'm interested in to your question about, like, has anyone compiled this list of, like, science health? Or the health of science, right? It's maybe the right way of thinking about it. is that, like, those indicators may mean very different things at different points in time, right? And so part of it is trying to understand, like, yeah, what is the state of the, what is the state of this economy of science that we're talking about? Yeah. You're kind of preaching [00:30:07] Ben: to the, to the choir. In the sense that I'm, I'm always, I'm frustrated with the level of nuance that I feel like many people who are discussing, like, science, quote, making air quotes, science and research, are, are talking about in the sense that. They very often have not actually like gone in and been part of the system. Huh, right. And I'm, I'm open to the fact that [00:30:35] you [00:30:35] Tim: don't need to have got like [00:30:36] Ben: done, been like a professional researcher to have an opinion [00:30:41] Tim: or, or come up with ideas about it. [00:30:43] Ben: Yeah. But at the same time, I feel like [00:30:46] Tim: there's, yeah, like, like, do you, do you think about that tension at all? Yeah. I think it's actually incredibly valuable. Like, I think So I think of like Death and Life of Great American Cities, right? Which is like, the, the, the really, one of the really, there's a lot of interesting things about that book. But like, one of the most interesting things is sort of the notion that like, you had a whole cabal of urban planners that had this like very specific vision about how to get cities to work right and it just turns out that like if you like are living in soho at a particular time and you like walk along the street and you like take a look at what's going on like there's always really actually super valuable things to know about yeah that like are only available because you're like at that like ultra ultra ultra ultra micro level and i do think that there's actually some potential value in there like one of the things i would love to be able to set up, like, in the community of MetaScience or whatever you want to call it, right, [00:31:35] is the idea that, like, yeah, you, you could afford to do, like, very short tours of duty, where it's, like, literally, you're just, like, spending a day in a lab, right, and, like, to have a bunch of people go through that, I think, is, like, really, really helpful and so I think, like, thinking about, like, what the rotation program for that looks like, I think would be cool, like, you, you should, you should do, like, a six month stint at the NSF just to see what it looks like. Cause I think that kind of stuff is just like, you know, well, A, I'm selfish, like I would want that, but I also think that like, it would also allow the community to like, I think be, be thinking about this in a much more applied way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:32:08] Ben: I think it's the, the meta question there for, for everything, right? Is how much in the weeds, like, like what am I trying to say? The. It is possible both to be like two in the weeds. Yeah, right and then also like too high level Yeah, that's right. And in almost like what what is the the right amount or like? Who, who should [00:32:31] Tim: be talking to whom in that? That's right. Yeah, I mean, it's like what you were saying earlier that like the [00:32:35] success of macro science will be whether or not it's as controversial as macroeconomics. It's like, I actually hope that that's the case. It's like people being like, this is all wrong. You're approaching it like from a too high level, too abstract of a level. Yeah. I mean, I think the other benefit of doing this outside of like the level of insight is I think one of the projects that I think I have is like We need to, we need to be like defeating meta science, like a love of meta science aesthetics versus like actual like meta science, right? Like then I think like a lot of people in meta science love science. That's why they're excited to not talk about the specific science, but like science in general. But like, I think that intuition also leads us to like have very romantic ideas of like what science is and how science should look and what kinds of science that we want. Yeah. Right. The mission is progress. The mission isn't science. And so I think, like, we have to be a lot more functional. And again, I think, like, the benefit of these types of, like, rotations, like, Oh, you just are in a lab for a month. Yeah. It's like, I mean, you get a lot more of a sense of, like, Oh, okay, this is, this is what it [00:33:35] looks like. Yeah. Yeah. I'd like to do the same thing for manufacturing. Huh. Right. [00:33:39] Ben: Right. It's like, like, and I want, I want everybody to be rotating, right? Huh. Like, in the sense of, like, okay, like, have the scientists go and be, like, in a manufacturing lab. That's right. [00:33:47] Tim: Yeah. [00:33:48] Ben: And be like, okay, like, look. Like, you need to be thinking about getting this thing to work in, like, this giant, like, flow pipe instead of a [00:33:54] Tim: test tube. That's right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, [00:33:57] Ben: unfortunately, the problem is that we can't all spend our time, like, if everybody was rotating through all the [00:34:03] Tim: things they need to rotate, we'd never get anything done. Yeah, exactly. [00:34:06] Ben: ANd that's, that's, that's kind of [00:34:08] Tim: the problem. Well, and to bring it all the way back, I mean, I think you started this question on macroscience in the context of transitioning away from all of this like weird Cuban Missile Crisis simulation stuff. Like, I do think one way of thinking about this is like, okay, well, if we can't literally send you into a lab, right? Like the question is like, what are good simulations to give people good intuitions about the dynamics in the space? Yeah. And I think that's, that's potentially quite interesting. Yeah. Normalized weekend long simulation. That's right. Like I love the idea of basically [00:34:35] like like you, you get to reenact the publication of a prominent scientific paper. It's like kind of a funny idea. It's just like, you know, yeah. Or, or, or even trying to [00:34:44] Ben: get research funded, right? Like, it's like, okay, like you have this idea, you want yeah. [00:34:55] Tim: I mean, yeah, this is actually a project, I mean, I've been talking to Zach Graves about this, it's like, I really want to do one which is a game that we're calling Think Tank Tycoon, which is basically like, it's a, it's a, the idea would be for it to be a strategy board game that simulates what it's like to run a research center. But I think like to broaden that idea somewhat like it's kind of interesting to think about the idea of like model NSF Yeah, where you're like you you're in you're in the hot seat you get to decide how to do granting Yeah, you know give a grant [00:35:22] Ben: a stupid thing. Yeah, some some some congressperson's gonna come banging [00:35:26] Tim: on your door Yeah, like simulating those dynamics actually might be really really helpful Yeah I mean in the very least even if it's not like a one for one simulation of the real world just to get like some [00:35:35] common intuitions about like The pressures that are operating here. I [00:35:38] Ben: think you're, the bigger point is that simulations are maybe underrated [00:35:42] Tim: as a teaching tool. I think so, yeah. Do you remember the the paperclip maximizer? Huh. The HTML game? Yeah, yeah. [00:35:48] Ben: I'm, I'm kind of obsessed with it. Huh. Because, it, you've, like, somehow the human brain, like, really quickly, with just, like, you know, some numbers on the screen. Huh. Like, just like numbers that you can change. Right, right. And some, like, back end. Dynamic system, where it's like, okay, like based on these numbers, like here are the dynamics of the [00:36:07] Tim: system, and it'll give you an update. [00:36:09] Ben: Like, you start to really get an intuition for, for system dynamics. Yeah. And so, I, I, I want to see more just like plain HTML, like basically like spreadsheet [00:36:20] Tim: backend games. Right, right, like the most lo fi possible. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's helpful. I mean, I think, again, particularly in a world where you're thinking about, like, let's simulate these types of, like, weird new grant structures that we might try out, right? Like, you know, we've got a bunch [00:36:35] of hypotheses. It's kind of really expensive and difficult to try to get experiments done, right? Like, does a simulation with a couple people who are well informed give us some, at least, inclinations of, like, where it might go or, like, what are the unintentional consequences thereof? Yeah. [00:36:51] Ben: Disciplines besides the military that uses simulations [00:36:56] Tim: successfully. Not really. And I think what's kind of interesting is that like, I think it had a vogue that like has kind of dissipated. Yeah, I think like the notion of like a a game being the way you kind of do like understanding of a strategic situation, I think like. Has kind of disappeared, right? But like, I think a lot of it was driven, like, RAND actually had a huge influence, not just on the military. But like, there's a bunch of corporate games, right? That were like, kind of invented in the same period. Yeah. That are like, you determine how much your steel production is, right? And was like, used to teach MBAs. But yeah, I think it's, it's been like, relatively limited. Hm. [00:37:35] Yeah. It, yeah. Hm. [00:37:38] Ben: So. Other things. Huh. Like, just to, [00:37:41] Tim: to shift together. Sure, sure, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess another [00:37:44] Ben: thing that we haven't really talked about, but actually sort of plays into all of this, is thinking about better [00:37:50] Tim: ways of regulating technology. [00:37:52] Ben: I know that you've done a lot of thinking about that, and maybe this is another thing to simulate. [00:38:00] Tim: Yeah, it's a model OSTP. But [00:38:04] Ben: it's maybe a thing where, this is actually like a prime example where the particulars really matter, right? Where you can't just regulate. quote unquote technology. Yeah. Right. And it's like, there's, there's some technologies that you want to regulate very, very closely and very tightly and others that you want to regulate very [00:38:21] Tim: loosely. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that's actually, you know, I think it is tied to the kind of like macro scientific project, if you will. Right. Which is that I think we have often a notion of like science regulation being like. [00:38:35] literally the government comes in and is like, here are the kind of constraints that we want to put on the system. Right. And there's obviously like lots of different ways of doing that. And I think there's lots of contexts in which that's like appropriate. But I think for a lot of technologies that we confront right now, the change is so rapid that the obvious question always becomes, no matter what emerging technology talking about is like, how does your clock speed of regulation actually keep up with like the clock speed of technology? And the answer is frequently like. It doesn't, right? And like you run into these kind of like absurd situations where you're like, well, we have this thing, it's already out of date by the time it goes into force, everybody kind of creates some like notional compliance with that rule. Yeah. And like, in terms of improving, I don't know, safety outcomes, for instance, it like has not actually improved safety outcomes. And I think in that case, right, and I think I could actually make an argument that like, the problem is becoming more difficult with time. Right? Like, if you really believe that the pace of technological change is faster than it used to be, then it is possible that, like, there was a point at which, like, government was operating, and it could actually keep [00:39:35] pace effectively, or, like, a body like Congress could actually keep pace with society, or with technology successfully, to, like, make sure that it was conformant with, sort of, like, societal interests. Do you think that was [00:39:46] Ben: actually ever the case, or was it that we didn't, we just didn't [00:39:50] Tim: have as many regulations? I would say it was sort of twofold, right? Like, I think one of them was you had, at least, let's just talk about Congress, right? It's really hard to talk about, like, government as a whole, right? Like, I think, like, Congress was both better advised and was a more efficient institution, right? Which means it moved faster than it does today. Simultaneously, I also feel like for a couple reasons we can speculate on, right? Like, science, or in the very least, technology. Right, like move slower than it does today. Right, right. And so like actually what has happened is that both both dynamics have caused problems, right? Which is that like the organs of government are moving slower at the same time as science is moving faster And like I think we've passed some inflection [00:40:35] point now where like it seems really hard to craft You know, let's take the AI case like a sensible framework that would apply You know, in, in LLMs where like, I don't know, like I was doing a little recap of like recent interoperability research and I like took a step back and I was like, Oh, all these papers are from May, 2023. And I was like, these are all big results. This is all a big deal. Right. It's like very, very fast. Yeah. So that's kind of what I would say to that. Yeah. I don't know. Do you feel differently? You feel like Congress has never been able to keep up? Yeah. [00:41:04] Ben: Well, I. I wonder, I guess I'm almost, I'm, I'm perhaps an outlier in that I am skeptical of the claim that technology overall has sped up significantly, or the pace of technological change, the pace of software change, certainly. Sure. Right. And it's like maybe software as a, as a fraction of technology has spread up, sped up. And maybe like, this is, this is a thing where like to the point of, of regulations needing to, to. Go into particulars, [00:41:35] right? Mm-Hmm. . Right, right. Like tuning the regulation to the characteristic timescale of whatever talk [00:41:40] Tim: technology we're talking about. Mm-Hmm. , right? [00:41:42] Ben: But I don't know, but like, I feel like outside of software, if anything, technology, the pace of technological change [00:41:52] Tim: has slowed down. Mm hmm. Right. Right. Yeah. [00:41:55] Ben: This is me putting on my [00:41:57] Tim: stagnationist bias. And would, given the argument that I just made, would you say that that means that it should actually be easier than ever to regulate technology? Yeah, I get targets moving slower, right? Like, yeah, [00:42:12] Ben: yeah. Or it's the technology moving slowly because of the forms of [00:42:14] Tim: the regulator. I guess, yeah, there's like compounding variables. [00:42:16] Ben: Yeah, the easiest base case of regulating technology is saying, like, no, you can't have [00:42:20] Tim: any. Huh, right, right, right. Like, it can't change. Right, that's easy to regulate. Yeah, right, right. That's very easy to regulate. I buy that, I buy that. It's very easy to regulate well. Huh, right, right. I think that's [00:42:27] Ben: That's the question. It's like, what do we want to lock in and what don't we [00:42:31] Tim: want to lock in? Yeah, I think that's right and I think, you [00:42:35] know I guess what that moves me towards is like, I think some people, you know, will conclude the argument I'm making by saying, and so regulations are obsolete, right? Or like, oh, so we shouldn't regulate or like, let the companies take care of it. And I'm like, I think so, like, I think that that's, that's not the conclusion that I go to, right? Like part of it is like. Well, no, that just means we need, we need better ways of like regulating these systems, right? And I think they, they basically require government to kind of think about sort of like moving to different parts of the chain that they might've touched in the past. Yeah. So like, I don't know, we, Caleb and I over at IFP, we just submitted this RFI to DARPA. In part they, they were thinking about like how does DARPA play a role in dealing with like ethical considerations around emerging technologies. Yep. But the deeper point that we were making in our submission. was simply that like maybe actually science has changed in a way where like DARPA can't be the or it's harder for DARPA to be the originator of all these technologies. Yeah. So they're, they're almost, they're, they're placing the, the, the ecosystem, the [00:43:35] metabolism of technology has changed, which requires them to rethink like how they want to influence the system. Yeah. Right. And it may be more influence at the point of like. Things getting out to market, then it is things like, you know, basic research in the lab or something like that. Right. At least for some classes of technology where like a lot of it's happening in private industry, like AI. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. [00:43:55] Ben: No, I, I, I think the, the concept of, of like the metabolism of, of science and technology is like really powerful. I think in some sense it is, I'm not sure if you would, how would you map that to the idea of there being a [00:44:11] Tim: research ecosystem, right? Right. Is it, is it that there's like [00:44:17] Ben: the metabolic, this is, this is incredibly abstract. Okay. Like, is it like, I guess if you're looking at the metabolism, does, does the metabolism sort of say, we're going to ignore institutions for now and the metabolism is literally just the flow [00:44:34] Tim: of [00:44:35] like ideas and, and, and outcomes and then maybe like the ecosystem is [00:44:41] Ben: like, okay, then we like. Sort of add another layer and say there are institutions [00:44:46] Tim: that are sure interacting with this sort of like, yeah, I think like the metabolism view or, you know, you might even think about it as like a supply chain view, right? To move it away from, like, just kind of gesturing at bio for no reason, right? Is I think what's powerful about it is that, you know, particularly in foundation land, which I'm most familiar with. There's a notion of like we're going to field build and what that means is we're going to name a field and then researchers Are going to be under this tent that we call this field and then the field will exist Yeah, and then the proper critique of a lot of that stuff is like researchers are smart They just like go where the money is and they're like you want to call up like I can pretend to be nanotech for a Few years to get your money Like, that's no problem. I can do that. And so there's kind of a notion that, like, if you take the economy of science as, like, institutions at the very beginning, you actually miss the bigger [00:45:35] picture. Yes. Right? And so the metabolism view is more powerful because you literally think about, like, the movement of, like, an idea to an experiment to a practical technology to, like, something that's out in the world. Yeah. And then we basically say, how do we influence those incentives before we start talking about, like, oh, we announced some new policy that people just, like... Cosmetically align their agendas to yeah, and like if you really want to shape science It's actually maybe arguably less about like the institution and more about like Yeah, the individual. Yeah, exactly. Like I run a lab. What are my motivations? Right? And I think this is like, again, it's like micro macro, right? It's basically if we can understand that, then are there things that we could do to influence at that micro level? Yeah, right. Which is I think actually where a lot of Macro econ has moved. Right. Which is like, how do we influence like the individual firm's decisions Yeah. To get the overall aggregate change that we want in the economy. Yeah. And I think that's, that's potentially a better way of approaching it. Right. A thing that I desperately [00:46:30] Ben: want now is Uhhuh a. I'm not sure what they're, they're [00:46:35] actually called. Like the, you know, like the metal, like, like, like the [00:46:37] Tim: prep cycle. Yeah, exactly. Like, like, like the giant diagram of, of like metabolism, [00:46:43] Ben: right. I want that for, for research. Yeah, that would be incredible. Yeah. If, if only, I mean, one, I want to have it on [00:46:50] Tim: my wall and to, to just get across the idea that. [00:46:56] Ben: It is like, it's not you know, basic research, applied [00:47:01] Tim: research. Yeah, totally. Right, right, right. When it goes to like, and what I like about kind of metabolism as a way of thinking about it is that we can start thinking about like, okay, what's, what's the uptake for certain types of inputs, right? We're like, okay, you know like one, one example is like, okay, well, we want results in a field to become more searchable. Well what's really, if you want to frame that in metabolism terms, is like, what, you know, what are the carbs that go into the system that, like, the enzymes or the yeast can take up, and it's like, access to the proper results, right, and like, I think that there's, there's a nice way of flipping in it [00:47:35] that, like, starts to think about these things as, like, inputs, versus things that we do, again, because, like, we like the aesthetics of it, like, we like the aesthetics of being able to find research results instantaneously, but, like, the focus should be on, Like, okay, well, because it helps to drive, like, the next big idea that we think will be beneficial to me later on. Or like, even being [00:47:53] Ben: the question, like, is the actual blocker to the thing that you want to see, the thing that you think it is? Right. I've run into far more people than I can count who say, like, you know, we want more awesome technology in the world, therefore we are going to be working on Insert tool here that actually isn't addressing, at least my, [00:48:18] Tim: my view of why those things aren't happening. Yeah, right, right. And I think, I mean, again, like, part of the idea is we think about these as, like, frameworks for thinking about different situations in science. Yeah. Like, I actually do believe that there are certain fields because of, like, ideologically how they're set up, institutionally how [00:48:35] they're set up, funding wise how they're set up. that do resemble the block diagram you were talking about earlier, which is like, yeah, there actually is the, the basic research, like we can put, that's where the basic research happens. You could like point at a building, right? And you're like, that's where the, you know, commercialization happens. We pointed at another building, right? But I just happen to think that most science doesn't look like that. Right. And we might ask the question then, like, do we want it to resemble more of like the metabolism state than the block diagram state? Right. Like both are good. Yeah, I mean, I would [00:49:07] Ben: argue that putting them in different buildings is exactly what's causing [00:49:10] Tim: all the problems. Sure, right, exactly, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But then, again, like, then, then I think, again, this is why I think, like, the, the macro view is so powerful, at least to me, personally, is, like, we can ask the question, for what problems? Yeah. Right? Like, are there, are there situations where, like, that, that, like, very blocky way of doing it serves certain needs and certain demands? Yeah. And it's like, it's possible, like, one more argument I can make for you is, like, Progress might be [00:49:35] slower, but it's a lot more controllable. So if you are in the, you know, if you think national security is one of the most important things, you're willing to make those trade offs. But I think we just should be making those trade offs, like, much more consciously than we do. And [00:49:49] Ben: that's where politics, in the term, in the sense of, A compromise between people who have different priorities on something can actually come in where we can say, okay, like we're going to trade off, we're going to say like, okay, we're going to increase like national security a little bit, like in, in like this area to, in compromise with being able to like unblock this. [00:50:11] Tim: That's right. Yeah. And I think this is the benefit of like, you know, when I say lever, I literally mean lever, right. Which is basically like, we're in a period of time where we need this. Yeah. Right? We're willing to trade progress for security. Yeah. Okay, we're not in a period where we need this. Like, take the, take, ramp it down. Right? Like, we want science to have less of this, this kind of structure. Yeah. That's something we need to, like, have fine tuned controls over. Right? Yeah. And to be thinking about in, like, a, a comparative sense, [00:50:35] so. And, [00:50:36] Ben: to, to go [00:50:36] Tim: back to the metabolism example. Yeah, yeah. I'm really thinking about it. Yeah, yeah. [00:50:39] Ben: Is there an equivalent of macro for metabolism in the sense that like I'm thinking about like, like, is it someone's like blood, like, you know, they're like blood glucose level, [00:50:52] Tim: like obesity, right? Yeah, right. Kind of like our macro indicators for metabolism. Yeah, that's right. Right? Or like how you feel in the morning. That's right. Yeah, exactly. I'm less well versed in kind of like bio and medical, but I'm sure there is, right? Like, I mean, there is the same kind of like. Well, I study the cell. Well, I study, you know, like organisms, right? Like at different scales, which we're studying this stuff. Yeah. What's kind of interesting in the medical cases, like You know, it's like, do we have a Hippocratic, like oath for like our treatment of the science person, right? It's just like, first do no harm to the science person, you know? [00:51:32] Ben: Yeah, I mean, I wonder about that with like, [00:51:35] with research. Mm hmm. Is there, should we have more heuristics about how we're [00:51:42] Tim: Yeah, I mean, especially because I think, like, norms are so strong, right? Like, I do think that, like, one of the interesting things, this is one of the arguments I was making in the long science piece. It's like, well, in addition to funding certain types of experiments, if you proliferate the number of opportunities for these low scale projects to operate over a long period of time, there's actually a bunch of like norms that might be really good that they might foster in the scientific community. Right. Which is like you learn, like scientists learn the art of how to plan a project for 30 years. That's super important. Right. Regardless of the research results. That may be something that we want to put out into the open so there's more like your median scientist has more of those skills Yeah, right, like that's another reason that you might want to kind of like percolate this kind of behavior in the system Yeah, and so there's kind of like these emanating effects from like even one offs that I think are important to keep in mind [00:52:33] Ben: That's actually another [00:52:35] I think used for simulations. Yeah I'm just thinking like, well, it's very hard to get a tight feedback loop, right, about like whether you manage, you planned a project for 30 years [00:52:47] Tim: well, right, [00:52:48] Ben: right. But perhaps there's a better way of sort of simulating [00:52:51] Tim: that planning process. Yeah. Well, and I would love to, I mean, again, to the question that you had earlier about like what are the metrics here, right? Like I think for a lot of science metrics that we may end up on, they may have these interesting and really curious properties like we have for inflation rate. Right. We're like, the strange thing about inflation is that we, we kind of don't like, we have hypotheses for how it happens, but like, part of it is just like the psychology of the market. Yeah. Right. Like you anticipate prices will be higher next quarter. Inflation happens if enough people believe that. And part of what the Fed is doing is like, they're obviously making money harder to get to, but they're also like play acting, right? They're like. You know, trust me guys, we will continue to put pressure on the economy until you feel differently about this. And I think there's going to be some things in science that are worth [00:53:35] measuring that are like that, which is like researcher perceptions of the future state of the science economy are like things that we want to be able to influence in the space. And so one of the things that we do when we try to influence like the long termism or the short termism of science It's like, there's lots of kind of like material things we do, but ultimately the idea is like, what does that researcher in the lab think is going to happen, right? Do they think that, you know, grant funding is going to become a lot less available in the next six months or a lot more available in the next six months? Like influencing those might have huge repercussions on what happens in science. And like, yeah, like that's a tool that policymakers should have access to. Yeah. Yeah. [00:54:11] Ben: And the parallels between the. The how beliefs affect the economy, [00:54:18] Tim: and how beliefs [00:54:19] Ben: affect science, I think may also be a [00:54:21] Tim: little bit underrated. Yeah. In the sense that, [00:54:24] Ben: I, I feel like some people think that It's a fairly deterministic system where it's like, ah, yes, this idea's time has come. And like once, once all the things that are in place, like [00:54:35] once, once all, then, then it will happen. And like, [00:54:38] Tim: that is, that's like how it works. [00:54:40] Ben: Which I, I mean, I have, I wish there was more evidence to my point or to disagree with me. But like, I, I think that's, that's really not how it works. And I'm like very often. a field or, or like an idea will, like a technology will happen because people think that it's time for that technology to happen. Right. Right. Yeah. Obviously, obviously that isn't always the case. Right. Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's, there's hype [00:55:06] Tim: cycles. And I think you want, like, eventually, like. You know, if I have my druthers, right, like macro science should have like it's Chicago school, right? Which is basically like the idea arrives exactly when it should arrive. Scientists will discover it on exactly their time. And like your only role as a regulator is to ensure the stability of scientific institutions. I think actually that that is a, that's not a position I agree with, but you can craft a totally, Reasonable, coherent, coherent governance framework that's based around that concept, right? Yes. Yeah. I think [00:55:35] like [00:55:35] Ben: you'll, yes. I, I, I think like that's actually the criteria for success of meta science as a field uhhuh, because like once there's schools , then, then, then it will have made it, [00:55:46] Tim: because [00:55:47] Ben: there aren't schools right now. Mm-Hmm. , like, I, I feel , I almost feel I, I, I now want there to b
This episode is about Ben the bottleneck leader.Ben handles all the clients and finds his work piling up, while the people he manages are sitting there twiddling their thumbs with no work to do. To make matters worse, all the clients come to Ben, not the people who are supposed to be managing the clients. What can Ben do? In this episode, we discuss...1. WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?- A lack of confidence in his team - The company is lacking a system, or not using their system. Ben IS the system2. PROBLEMS - ben's mental health and Burnout - Being a people pleaser - Ego - Lack of trust in his team's quality of work- Negative impact of the people he leads: feeling like they're incompetent, they have no responsibility, thus it destroys their confidence 3. SOLUTIONS - How to bring the team back together- Effective team building - How to apologize to your team - Building a relationship with your team - Building a code of ethicsAt UpSkill, we are building a community of UpSkillers, learning and growing together. Please listen, subscribe and share!We offer Corporate Training, Coaching and Consulting Services Soft Skills Leadership Skills Inclusive Leadership Skills Book your Free Consultation today!www.upskillcommunity.com
Benis..... That is all. Btw thx for all the support latley!
Hello Ihr Mäuze, Wir sind zurück aus unserer Sommerpause und in der letzten Wochen und Monaten ist bei uns einiges passiert! Deshalb haben wir heute nochmal ein XXL Lifeupdate für euch!
BEN IS back as man on the street and Un-Filtered. Ben had to come back and talk about the budget that was passed in Louisiana and he did not sugar coat anything. He even made James blush Don't Miss it!
Hello Ihr Mäuze, Heute gibt es nach einiger Zeit nochmal ein kleines Life Update von uns!
Recorded by Allison Benis White for Poem-a-Day, a series produced by the Academy of American Poets. Published on March 20, 2023. www.poets.org
This week I talk about how 2023 is gonna be a good year, the window for falling in love, being honest, Penis Bo Benis, an annoying interaction on New Years, and more.
Welcome to Are You Ready? with Dave Elliott and William Thompson. New episodes every other Monday. Get tickets for William's Limelight show here - https://www.ticketmaster.ie/william-thompson-belfast-03-12-2022/event/38005C9BA1121846 Get in touch with the show at areyouready123pod@gmail.com
Nadia Asparouhova talks about idea machines on idea machines! Idea machines, of course, being her framework around societal organisms that turn ideas into outcomes. We also talk about the relationship between philanthropy and status, public goods and more. Nadia is a hard-to-categorize doer of many things: In the past, she spent many years exploring the funding, governance, and social dynamics of open source software, both writing a book about it called “Working in Public” and putting those ideas into practice at GitHub, where she worked to improve the developer experience. She explored parasocial communities and reputation-based economies as an independent researcher at Protocol Labs and put those ideas into practice as employee number two at Substack, focusing on the writer experience. She's currently researching what the new tech elite will look like, which forms the base of a lot of our conversation. Completely independently, the two of us came up with the term “idea machines” to describe same thing — in her words: “self-sustaining organisms that contains all the parts needed to turn ideas into outcomes.” I hope you enjoy my conversation with Nadia Asparouhova. Links Nadia's Idea Machines Piece Nadia's Website Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software Transcript [00:01:59] Ben: I really like your way of, of defining things and sort of bringing clarity to a lot of these very fuzzy words that get thrown around. So, so I'd love to sort of just get your take on how we should think about so a few definitions to start off with. So I, in your mind, what, what is tech, when we talk about like tech and philanthropy what, what is that, what is that entity. [00:02:23] Nadia: Yeah, tech is definitely a fuzzy term. I think it's best to find as a culture, more than a business industry. And I think, yeah, I mean, tech has been [00:02:35] associated with startups historically, but But like, I think it's transitioning from being this like pure software industry to being more like, more like a, a way of thinking. But personally, I don't think I've come across a good definition for tech anywhere. It's kind, you know? [00:02:52] Ben: Yeah. Do, do you think you could point to some like very sort of like characteristic mindsets of tech that you think really sort of set it. [00:03:06] Nadia: Yeah. I think the probably best known would be, you know, failing fast and moving fast and breaking things. I think like the interest in the sort of like David and gly model of an individual that is going up against an institution or some sort of. Complex bureaucracy that needs to be broken apart. Like the notion of disrupting, I think, is a very tech sort of mindset of looking at a problem and saying like, how can we do this better? So it, in a [00:03:35] weird way, tech is, I feel like it's sort of like, especially in relation, in contrast to crypto, I feel like it's often about iterating upon the way things are or improving things, even though I don't know that tech would like to be defined that way necessarily, but when I, yeah. Sort of compare it to like the crypto mindset, I feel like tech is kind of more about breaking apart institutions or, or doing yeah. Trying to do things better. [00:04:00] Ben: A a as opposed. So, so could you then dig into the, the crypto mindset by, by contrast? That's a, I think that's a, a subtle difference that a lot of people don't go into. [00:04:10] Nadia: Yeah. Like I think the crypto mindset is a little bit more about building a parallel universe entirely. It's about, I mean, well, one, I don't see the same drive towards creating monopolies in the way that and I don't know if that was like always a, you know, core value of tech, but I think in practice, that's kind of what it's been of. You try to be like the one thing that is like dominating a market. Whereas with crypto, I think people are [00:04:35] because they have sort of like decentralization as a core value, at least at this stage of their maturity. It's more about building lots of different experiments or trying lots of different things and enabling people to sort of like have their own little corner of the universe where they can, they have all the tools that they need to sort of like build their own world. Whereas the tech mindset seems to imply that there is only one world the world is sort of like dominated by these legacy institutions and it's Tech's job to fix. Those problems. So it's like very much engaged with what it sees as kind of like that, that legacy world or [00:05:10] Ben: Yeah, I, I hadn't really thought about it that way. But that, that totally makes sense. And I'm sure other people have, have talked about this, but do, do you feel that is an artifact of sort of the nature of the, the technology that they're predicated on? Like the difference between, I guess sort of. The internet and the, the internet of, of like SAS and servers and then the [00:05:35] internet of like blockchains and distributed things. [00:05:38] Nadia: I mean, it's weird. Cause if you think about sort of like early computing days, I don't really get that feeling at all. I'm not a computer historian or a technology historian, so I'm sure someone else has a much more nuanced answer to this than I do, but yeah. I mean, like when I think of like sixties, computer or whatever, it, it feels really intertwined with like creating new worlds. And that's why like, I mean, because crypto is so new, it's maybe. It, we can only really observe what's happening right now. I don't know that crypto will always look exactly like this in the future. In fact, it almost certainly will not. So it's hard to know like, what are, it's like core distinct values, but I, I just sort of noticed the contrast right now, at least, but probably, yeah, if you picked a different point in, in text history, sort of like pre startups, I guess and, and pre, or like that commercialization phase or that wealth accumulation phase it was also much more, I guess, like pie this guy. Right. But yeah, it feel, it feels like at least the startup mindset, or like whenever that point of [00:06:35] history started all this sort of like big successes were really about like overturning legacy industries, the, yeah. The term disruption was like such a buzzword. It's about, yeah. Taking something that's not working and making it better, which I think is like very intertwined with like programmer mindset. [00:06:51] Ben: It's yeah, it's true. And I'm just thinking about sort of like my impression of, of the early internet and it, and it did not have that same flavor. So, so perhaps it's a. Artifact of like the stage of a culture or ecosystem then like the technology underlying it. I guess [00:07:10] Nadia: And it's strange. Cause I, I feel like, I mean, there are people today who still sort of maybe fetishizes too strong, a word, but just like embracing that sort of early computing mindset. But it almost feels like a subculture now or something. It doesn't feel. yeah. I don't know. I don't, I don't find that that's like sort of the prevalent mindset in, in tech. [00:07:33] Ben: Well, it, it feels like the, the sort of [00:07:35] like mechanisms that drive tech really do sort of center. I mean, this is my bias, but like, I feel like the, the way that that tech is funded is primarily through venture capital, which only works if you're shooting for a truly massive Result and the way that you get a truly massive result is not to build like a little niche thing, but to try to take over an industry. [00:08:03] Nadia: It's about arbitrage [00:08:05] Ben: yeah. Or, or like, or even not even quite arbitrage, but just like the, the, to like, that's, that's where the massive amount of money is. And, and like, [00:08:14] Nadia: This means her like financially. I feel like when I think about the way that venture capital works, it's it's. [00:08:19] Ben: yeah, [00:08:20] Nadia: ex sort of exploiting, I guess, the, the low margin like cost models. [00:08:25] Ben: yeah, yeah, definitely. And like then using that to like, take over an industry, whereas if maybe like, you're, you're not being funded in a way [00:08:35] that demands, that sort of returns you don't need to take as, as much of a, like take over the world mindset. [00:08:41] Nadia: Yeah. Although I don't think like those two things have to be at odds with each other. I think it's just like, you know, there's like the R and D phase that is much more academic in nature and much more exploratory and then venture capital is better suited for the point in which some of those ideas can be commercialized or have a commercial opportunity. But I don't think, yeah, I don't, I don't think they're like fighting with each other either. [00:09:07] Ben: Really? I, I guess I, I don't know. It's like, so can I, can I, can I disagree and, and sort of say, like, it feels like the, the, the stance that venture type funding comes with, like forces on people is a stance of like, we are, we might fail, but we're, we're setting out to capture a huge, huge amount of value and like, [00:09:35] And, and, and just like in order for venture portfolios to work, that needs to be the mindset. And like there, there are other, I mean, there are just like other funding, ways of funding, things that sort of like ask for more modest returns. And they can't, I mean, they can't take as many risks. They come with other constraints, but, but like the, the need for those, those power law returns does drive a, the need to be like very ambitious in terms of scale. [00:10:10] Nadia: I guess, like what's an example of something that has modest financial returns, but massive social impact that can't be funded through philanthropy and academia or through through venture capital [00:10:29] Ben: Well, I mean, like are, I mean, like, I think that there's, [00:10:35] I think that, that, that, [00:10:38] Nadia: or I guess it [00:10:39] Ben: yeah, I think the philanthropy piece is really important. Sorry, go ahead. [00:10:42] Nadia: Yeah. I guess always just like, I feel like it was like different types of funding for different, like, I, I sort of visualized this pipeline of like, yeah. When you're in the R and D phase. Venture capital is not for you. There's other types of funding that are available. And then like, you know, when you get to the point where there are commercial opportunities, then you switch over to a different kind of funding. [00:11:01] Ben: Yeah. Yeah, no, I, I definitely agree with that. I, I, I think, I think what we're like where, where, where I was at least talking about is like that, that venture capital is sort of in the tech world is, is like the, the, the thing, the go to funding mechanism. [00:11:16] Nadia: Yeah. Yeah. Which is partly why I'm interested in, I guess, idea machines and other sources of funding that feel like they're at least starting to emerge now. Which I think gets back to those kinds of routes that, I mean, it's actually surprising to me that you can talk to people in tech who don't always make the connection that tech started as an, [00:11:35] you know, academically and government funded enterprise. And not venture venture capital came along later. Right then and so, yeah, maybe we, we're kind of at that point where there's been enough wealth generated that can kind of start that cycle again. [00:11:47] Ben: yeah. And, and speaking of that another distinction that, that you've made in your writing that I think is really important is the difference between charity and philanthropy. Do you mind unpacking how you think about that? [00:12:00] Nadia: Yeah. Charity is, is more like direct services. So you're not, there's sort of like a one to one, you put something in, you get sort of similar equal measure back out of it. And there's, I mean, charity is, you know, you can have like emergency relief or disasters or yeah, just like charitable services for people that need that kind of support. And to me, it's, it's just sort of strange that it always gets lumped in with philanthropy, which is a. Enterprise entirely philanthropy is more of the early stage pipeline [00:12:35] for it it's, it's more like venture capital, but for public goods in the same way that venture capital is very early stage financing for private goods. Philanthropy is very early stage financing for public goods. And if those public goods show promise or yeah, one need to be scaled, then you can go to government to get to get more funding to sustain it. Or maybe there are commercial opportunities or, you know, there are multiple paths that can, they can branch out from there. But yeah, philanthropy at its heart is about experimenting with really wild and crazy ideas that benefit public society that that could have massive social returns if successful. Whereas charity is not really about risk taking charity is really about providing a stable source of financing for those who really need it in the moment. [00:13:21] Ben: And, and the there's, there's two things I, I, I want to poke at there is like, do so. So you describe philanthropy as like crazy risk taking do, do you think that most [00:13:35] philanthropists see it, that. [00:13:37] Nadia: Today? No. And yeah, philanthropy has had this very varied history over the last, like let's say like modern philanthropy in its current form has only really existed since the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds. So we've got whatever, like a hundred, hundred 50 years. Most of what we think about in philanthropy today for, you know, most let's say adults that have really only grown up in the phase of philanthropy that you might call like late stage modern philanthropy to be a little cynical about it where it has. And, and part of that has just come from, I mean, just a bridge history of philanthropy, but you know, early on or. Premodern philanthropy. We had the the church was kind of maybe more played more of that, that role or that that force in both like philanthropic experiments and direct services. And then like when, in the age of sort of like, yeah, post gilded, age, post industrial revolution you had people who made a lot of, lot of self-made wealth. And you had people that were experimenting with new ideas [00:14:35] to provide public goods and services to society. And government at the time was not really playing a role in that. And so all that was coming from private citizens and private capital. And so those are, yeah, there was a time in which philanthropy was much more experimental in that way. But then as government sort of stepped in around you know, mid 19 hundreds to become sort of like that primary provider and funder of public services that diminished the role of philanthropy. And then in the late 1960s, Foundations just became much more heavily regulated. And I think that was sort of like the turning point where philanthropy went from being this like highly experimental and, and just sort of like aggressive risk taking sort of enterprise to much more like safe because it was just sort of like hampered by all these like accountability requirements. So yeah, I think like philanthropy today is not representative of what philanthropy has been historically or what it could be. [00:15:31] Ben: A and what are, what are some of your favorite, like weird, [00:15:35] risky pre regulation, philanthropic things. [00:15:40] Nadia: Oh, I don't do favorites, but [00:15:42] Ben: Oh, okay. Well what, what are, what are some, some amusing examples of, of risky philanthropic cakes. [00:15:51] Nadia: one I mean, [00:15:52] Ben: Take a couple. [00:15:54] Nadia: Probably like the most famous example would be like Carnegie public libraries. So like our public library system started as a privately funded experiment. And for each library that was created Andrew Carnegie would ask the government, the, the local government or the local community to find he would help fund the creation of the libraries. And then the government would have to find a way to like continue to sustain it and support it over the years. So it was this nice sort of like, I guess, public private type partnership. But then you have, I mean, also scientific research and public health initiatives that were philanthropically supported and funded. So Rockefeller's eradication of worm as a yeah. Public health initiative finding care for yellow fever. Those are some [00:16:35] examples. Yeah. I mean the public school education system in the south did not exist until there was sort of like an initiative to say, why aren't there public schools in the south and how do we just create them and, and fund. So and then also like the state of American private universities, which were sort of modeled after European universities at the time. But also came about after private philanthropists were funding research into understanding, like why is our American higher education? Not very good, you know, at the time it was like, not that good compared to the German university models. And so there was a bunch of research that was produced from that. And then they kind of like set out to yeah. Reform American universities and, yeah. So, I mean, there, there're just like so many examples of people just sort of saying, and, and I think like, I, I, one thing I do wanna caveat is like, I'm not regressive in the sense of. Wow. This thing, you know, worked really well a hundred years ago. And why don't we just do the exact same thing again? I feel like that's like a common pitfall in history. It's not that I think, you know, [00:17:35] everything about the world is completely different today versus let's say 19 years, but [00:17:39] Ben: in the past. And so it could be different to her in the [00:17:41] Nadia: exactly that that's sort of, the takeaway is like, where we're at right now is not a terminal state or it doesn't have to be a terminal state. Like philanthropy has been through many different phases and it can continue to have other phases in the future. They're not gonna look exactly like they did historically, but yeah. [00:17:56] Ben: That, that's that such a good distinction. And it goes for, for so many things where like, like when you point to historical examples I don't know. Like, I, I think that I, I suffer the same thing where I, you know, it's like you point to, to historical examples and it's like, not, it's not bringing up the historical examples to say, like, we should go back to this it's to say, like, it has been different and it could be different. [00:18:18] Nadia: Something I think about, and this is a little, it just, I don't know. I, I just think of like any, any adult today in, like, let's say like the, the who's like active in the workforce. We're talking about the span of like a, you know, like 30 year institutional memory or something. Like, and so [00:18:35] like anything that we think about, like, what is like possible or not possible is just like limited by like our biological lifespans. Like anyone you're talking, like, all we ever know is like, what we've grown up with in like, let's say the last 30 ish years for anyone. And so it's like, the reason why it's important to study history is to remind yourself that like everything that you know about, you know, what I think about philanthropy right now, based on the inputs I've been given in my lifetime is very different from if I study history and go, oh, actually it's only been that way for like pretty short amount of time. Only a few decades. [00:19:06] Ben: Yeah, totally. And I, I, I guess this is, this might be a, a slightly people might disagree with this, but from, from my perspective there's been sort of less institutional change within. The lifetime of most people in, in the workforce and especially most people in tech, which tends to skew younger than there was in the past, [00:19:30] Nadia: Yeah. [00:19:32] Ben: like, or, or like to put, put more fine on a point of it. [00:19:35] Like there's, there seems to have been less institutional change in the like latter half of the, the 20th century than in the first, like two thirds of it. [00:19:44] Nadia: Yeah. I think that's right. It feels much more much more stagnant. [00:19:49] Ben: Yeah. And I, I think the, the last thing like pull, pull us back to, to, to definitions real quick. So how, how do you like to describe idea of machines to people? Like if, if someone was like, Nadia, what, what is an idea machine besides this podcast? How would you, how would you describe that? [00:20:05] Nadia: I would point them to my blog post. So I don't have to explain it. [00:20:08] Ben: Okay. Excellent. Perfect. Everybody. [00:20:14] Nadia: If I had to, I mean, if I had to sort of explain in short version, I would say it's kind of like the modern successor to philanthropic foundations, maybe depending who I'm talking to, I might say that or yeah, it's just, it's sort of like a, a framework for understanding the interaction between funders and communities and that are like [00:20:35] centered around to similar ideology and how they turn ideas into outcomes is like there's a whole bunch of soft social infrastructure that, that. To take someone who says, Hey, I have an NDO. Why don't we do X? And like, how does that actually happen in the world? There's so many different inputs that like come together to make that happen. And that was just sort of my attempt at creating a framework for. [00:20:54] Ben: Yeah, no, I think it's a really good framework. And, and the, the, one of the, the powerful things I think in it is that you say there's like these like five components where there's like an ideology, a community ideas, an agenda, and people who capitalize the agenda. And then and I guess I'll, I'll like caveat this for, for the listeners, like in, in the piece you use effective altruism or EA for short as, as a, kind of like a case study in, in idea machines. And so it is, is sort of very topical right now. And I, I think what we will try to avoid is like the, the topical topics about it, but use it as a, an object of study. I think it's actually a very good object of study. [00:21:35] For thinking about these things. And, and actually one of the things that I thought was, was sort of stood out to me about it about EA a as opposed to many other philanthropies is that EA feels like one of the few places where the people who are capitalizing the agenda are, are willing to capitalize other people's other people's agendas as opposed to, to like sort of imposing their own on that. Do you, do you get a sense of that? [00:22:03] Nadia: Yeah. Yeah. It feels, it feels like there's. Mm, yeah. Some sort of shift there. So, I mean, if you think about. You know, someone got super wealthy in the let's call, Haiti of, of the five, one C three foundation. Like, I don't know, let's say like the fifties or something. Yeah, someone, someone makes a ton of money and like the next step is at some point they end up setting up a charitable foundation, they appoint a committee of people to help them figure out like, what should my agenda? And they, but it's all kind of like flowing from the donor and saying like, I want to [00:22:35] create this thing in the world. I wanna fund this thing in the world because it's sort of like my personal interest. Whereas I feel like we're starting to see some examples today of sure. Like, you know, there has to be alignment between a funder's interest and maybe like a community's interest. But in some ways the agenda is being driven, not just by the funder or like foundation staff but by a community of people that are sort of all like talking to each other and saying like, here's what we think is the most important agenda. And so it feels in some ways, like much. Yeah, much more organic. And it's not to say that, you know, the funder is not influencing that or doesn't have an influence in that. But but I, I sort of like seeing now that there, if, if it feels like it's like much more yeah. Intertwined or like it could go in a lot of different directions. So yeah, you see that with EA, which was the example I had used of like the agenda is very strongly driven by its community. It's not like there's like one foundation of, of people that are just like sitting in an ivory tower and saying, here's what we think we should fund. And then they just like go off and do it. And I think that just creates a lot more [00:23:35] possibilities for serendipity around, like what kinds of ideas end up getting funded? [00:23:38] Ben: Yeah. And it also, it also feels like at least to me I'd be interested if you agree with this, it feels like it makes for situations where you can actually like pool capital more easily for for, for sort of like larger projects. Where, when it's, it's like individual. When there's not sort of like a, a broader agenda you have sort of like the, the funding gets very dispersed, but whereas like, if there's, there's a way for like multiple funders to say like, okay, like this is an important thing, then it makes it much easier to like pull capital for, for bigger ideas. [00:24:19] Nadia: Yeah, I think that's right. Like I think within the world of philanthropy, there's it is just sort of more naturally. Towards zero sum games and competitiveness of funding because there's just less funding available. And because there is always this sort of like [00:24:35] reputation or status aspect intertwined with it, where like you wanna be, you know, the funder that made something happen in the world. But I agree that when it, the, the, the, the boundaries feel a little bit more porous when it's not just like, you know, two distinct foundations that are competing with each other or two distinct funders, but it's like, we're, there are multiple funders, you know, that are existing, bigger fish, smaller fish, or whatever that are like, sort of amplifying the agenda of, of a separate community that is not, you know, is not even formally affiliated with any of, any of these funders. [00:25:08] Ben: Yeah. And do, do you have a sense of how, like, almost like what, what are the, the necessary preconditions for that? Level of community to, to come about. Right. Like EA I think maybe is it's under talked about how, like it has, you know, a hundred years of like thinking behind it, of, of before [00:25:35] people really, you know, it's like sort of like different utilitarian and consequentialist philosophers, really sort of like working out, like thinking about how do we prioritize things. And, and so it's just, I guess it's like, if for, for like creating new, powerful, useful idea machines, like what, what are sort of like the, the like bricks that need to be created to lay the groundwork for them? [00:26:01] Nadia: Yeah. I mean, you've seen it come out in different sorts of ways. So like for EA, as you said it, I mean, it already existed before any major funders came in. It was for, I mean, first you have sort of its historical roots in utilitarianism, which go way back, but then even just effective altruism itself was, you know, started in Oxford and like was an academic discipline right at, at its outset. So there was already a seed of something there before they had major funders coming in, but then there are other, other types of idea machines, I think that are where like that community has to be actively nurtured. And it's weird cause [00:26:35] yeah, I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Or I think people tend to. Underestimate, how many communities had a lot of elbow grace put in to get them going, right. So it's like, you need to create some initial momentum to build a scene. It's not like it's not always just, you know, a handful of people got together and decided to make a thing. I think that's sort of like the historical story that guest glorified, like we like thinking about a bunch of artists and creatives that are just sort of like hanging out at the same cafe and then like, you know, this scene starts to organically form. That's definitely a thing, but right, right. But you know, there's also, yeah. In, in many cases there are funders behind the scenes who are helping make these things happen. They're, you know, convenings that are organized, there are you know, individual academics or or creatives or writers that are being funded in order to help you. Bring these sorts of ideas to to the, [00:27:35] the forefront of, of people's minds. So yeah, I think there's a lot of work that can go, it's just like, you know, start anything, but there's a lot of work that can go on behind the scenes to help these communities even start to exist. But then they start to have these compounding returns for funders, I think, where it's like, okay, now, instead of, you know, instead of hiring a couple of program officers to my foundation I am starting this like community of people that is now a beacon for attracting other people I might not have even even heard of that are sort of like flocking to this cause. And it's sort of like a, a talent, well, in itself, [00:28:08] Ben: Yeah. To change tracks a little bit. So with, with these sort of like new waves of like sort of potential philanthropists in, in both like the tech world or the crypto world do you have any sense of like risky, philanthropic experiments that you would want to see people do? Like just sort of like any, any kind of wishlist. [00:28:32] Nadia: I don't know. I don't know if that's like the role that I am trying to play [00:28:35] necessarily. I mean, I think like personally one area that still feels the way I think about it is I just think about, you know, what are the different components of, of, of the public sector and sort of like what areas are being more or less. Covered right now. And so we see funders that are getting more involved in politics and policy. We see funders that are you know, replicating or trying to, to field build in, in academia. I feel like media is still strangely kind of overlooked or just this big enigma to me, at least when I think about, yeah. How do, how do funders influence different aspects of the public sector? And so, yeah, there's, there's sort of, well, I don't think it's even necessarily a lack of interest because I, I see a lot of. You know, again, that sort of tech mindset and yeah, I guess I'm more specific thinking about tech right now, but going back to, you know, tech wanting to break apart institutions or tech, sort of like being this ancy teenager that is like railing against the institution you see a lot [00:29:35] of that and there's, you know, a lot of tension between tech industry and media right now. So you see that sort of like champing up bit. But then it's not clear to me, like what, like what they're doing to replace that. Is it, and, and, and some of that is just maybe more existential questions about like, what is the future of media? Like, what should that be? Is it this sort of focus on individual media creators instead of, you know, going to like the mainstream newspaper or the mainstream TV network or whatever you're going to Joe Rogan, let's say that's relevant today, cuz I just saw. Mark Zuckerberg did an interview on, on Joe Rogan so like, you know, is, is it like, is that what the future looks like? Is that the vision of what tech wants media to look like? It's not totally clear to me what the answer is yet, but, and I also feel like I'm seeing sort of like a lack of interest in and funding towards that. So that that's sort of like one area where, and it's sort of unsurprising to me, I guess that like, you know, tech is gonna be interested in like science or [00:30:35] politics. And maybe just sort of tech is not great at thinking about cultural artifacts. But you know, in terms of like my personal wishlist or just areas where I think their deficiencies on the sort of public sector checklists that, that one of them. [00:30:49] Ben: yeah, no, that's that's and I think the important thing is, is to, to flag these things. Right. Cuz it's like, it's, it's sort of hard to know what counterfactuals are, but it's like, yeah, like like media media as public goods. Does seem like kind of underrated as an idea, right. It's like would, would, I don't know. It's like, I think Sesame Street's really important and that was, that was publicly funded, right? [00:31:17] Nadia: mm-hmm and even education is sort of like a, a weird, like, I mean, there's talk about homeschooling. There's talk about how universities aren't, you know, really adequate today. I mean, you have like the, you know, one effort to, to [00:31:35] build a new university, but it feels. I don't know, I'm still sort of like waiting for like, what are like the really big, ambitious efforts that we're gonna see in terms of like tech people that are trying to rebuild either, you know, primary, secondary education or higher education. I just, yeah, I don't know. [00:31:53] Ben: Yeah, no, that, that that's in a great, a great place. Like it does not feel like there have been a lot of ambitious experiments there. In terms of right. Like anything along the lines of, of like building all the, the public schools in the south. Right. [00:32:06] Nadia: Right. Like at that level and this actually, I mean, this is like, and I think you, and I may not agree on this topic, but like I do genuinely wonder, you know, at the same time, we're also iterating at the same time you have these, you know, cycles of wealth that come in and, and shape public society in different ways, on like a broader scale. You also have the, you know, a hundred year institutional cycle where like, Institutions are built and then they kind of mature and then they, they start to stagnate and, and die down. What have we learned from like the last a hundred [00:32:35] years of institution building? Like maybe we learned that institutions are not as great as they seem, or they inevitably decline. And like, maybe people are interested in ways to avoid that in, in other words, like, you know, do we need to build another CNN in, in the realm of media? Or do we need to build another Harvard or is maybe the takeaway that like institutions themselves are falling out of favor and the philanthropically funded experiments might not look like the next Harvard, but they're gonna look like some, yeah, some, some sort of more broken down version of that. [00:33:05] Ben: Ooh, [00:33:06] Nadia: I don't know. And yeah. Yeah. I don't know. [00:33:10] Ben: sorry. Go, go ahead. [00:33:11] Nadia: Oh, I was just gonna say, I mean, like, this is, this is where I feel like history only has limited things to teach us. Right. Because yeah, the sort of copy paste answer would be. There used to be better institutions. Let's just build new institutions. But I think, and I think this is actually where crypto is thinking more critically about this than tech where crypto says like, yeah, like, why are we [00:33:35] just gonna repeat the same mistakes over and over again? Let's just do something completely different. Right. And I think that is maybe part of the source of their disinterest in what legacy institutions are doing, where they're just like, we're not even trying to do that. We're not trying to replicate that. We wanna just re rethink that concept entirely. I, I feel like, yeah, in tech, there's still a bit of LARPing around like, like around like, you know, without sort of the critical question of like, what did we, what did we take away from that? Maybe that wasn't so good. What we did in the past. [00:34:04] Ben: Yeah, well, I, I guess my response just is, is I think definitely that. That institutions are not functioning as well as they have. I think the, the question is like, what is the conclusion to draw from that? And, and maybe the, the conclusion I draw is that we need like different, like newer, different [00:34:35] institutions. And I feel like there's different levels of implicitness or explicitness of an institution, but broadly, it is some way of coordinating people that last through time. Right. And so, even what people are doing in crypto is I would argue building institutions. They just are organized wildly differently than ones we've seen before. [00:35:00] Nadia: Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's like, so the history is so short in crypto. It's hard to say what exactly anyone is trying to do until maybe we can understand that in retrospect. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I, I think like there is just like some. Like, I feel like there's probably some learning from, from open source where I spent a lot of my brain space in the past around like, it was just like an entirely different type of coordination model from, from like centralized cozy firms. [00:35:34] Ben: Yeah. [00:35:34] Nadia: [00:35:35] And like there's some learning there and, and crypto is modeling itself much more after like open source projects than it is after like KO's theory of the firm. And, and so I, so I, I think there's probably some learnings there of like, yes, they're building things. I don't know. I mean, like in the world of opensource, like a lot of these projects don't last very, like you don't sort of like iterate upon existing projects. A lot of times you just build a new project and then eventually try to get people to like switch over to that project. So it's like these much shorter lifespans And so I don't, I don't know what that looks like in terms of institutional design for like the public sector or social institutions, but I just, yeah, I don't know. I think I just sort of wonder what that looks like. And yeah, I do see, like, there are some experiments within sort of like non crypto tech world as well. Like I was just thinking about Institute for progress and they're a, a policy think tank in, in DC. And I think like one of the things that they're doing well is trying to iterate [00:36:35] upon the sort of, you know, existing think tech tank model. And like one of the things that they acknowledge better than maybe, you know, you go to ano you go to a sort of like one of the stodgy older think tanks, and you're like, your brand is the think tank, right? You are like an employee of that place and you are representing their brand. Whereas I think my sense, at least with Institute for progress is they've been a little bit more like you are someone who is an expert already in your. domain. You, you already have your own audience. You're, you're someone who's already widely known and we're kind of like the infrastructure that is supporting you. I don't wanna speak on their behalf. That's sort of like the way I've been understanding it. And yeah, I mean, so, you know, even outside of crypto, I think people are still contending with that whole atomization of the firm, cetera, etcetera of like how do you balance or like individual reputation versus firm reputation. And maybe that is where it plays out. Like to my question about, you know, are you trying to build another media institution or is it just about supporting like lots of in individual influencers? But yeah, [00:37:35] just, I wonder like, are we sitting here waiting for new institutions to be built and like, actually there are no more, maybe we're just like institutions period are dying and like that's the future. Or yeah, at the same time, like they do provide this sort of like history and memory that is useful. So I don't know. [00:37:51] Ben: yeah, I mean, like, it sounds to me like, there's, there's, I mean, from what you're saying, there's like a much more sort of subtle way to look at it where there's, there's like a number of different sort of like sliders or spectra, right. Where it's like, how. I don't know, like internalized versus externalized, the institution is right where it's like, you think of like your like 1950s company and it's like, people are like subsume themselves to it. Right. And that's like on some end of the spectrum. And then on the other end of the spectrum, it's like like, I don't know, like YouTube, right. Where it's like, yeah. Like all like YouTube YouTubers are like technically all YouTubers, but like beyond that [00:38:35] they have no like coordination or, or real like connection. And like, and like that's one access. And then like new institutions could like come in and, and maybe we're like moving towards an era of history where like the, like just there is more externalization, but then like, sort of like explicitly acknowledging that and then figuring out how to. Do a lot of good and like have that, that sort of like institutional memory, given the, a world where, where like everybody's a brand [00:39:09] Nadia: Yeah. [00:39:10] Ben: that it, it seems like it's, that's not necessarily like institutions are dead. It's just like institutions live in a different like, like are, are just like structurally different [00:39:23] Nadia: Yeah. Yeah. Like, I, I, I wondered, like if we just sort of embrace the fact that maybe we are moving towards having much shorter memories like what does a short term memory [00:39:35] institution look like? I dunno, like maybe that's just sort where, right. You know, like I try to sort of like observe what is happening versus kind of being like, it should be different. And so like, if that just is what it is then, like, how do we design for that? I have an idea and I think that actually get to like part of what crypto is trying to do differently is saying, okay, like, this is where we have sort like trustless and where we have the rules that are encoded into a protocol where like, you don't need to remember anything like the, the network is remembering for you. [00:40:03] Ben: Yeah, I'm just thinking, I, I haven't actually watched it, but do you know the movie memento, which I [00:40:09] Nadia: Yes, [00:40:10] Ben: a guy who has yeah, exactly is short term memory loss and just like tattoos all over his body. So it's like, what, what is the institutional version of that? I guess, I guess like, yeah, exactly. That's that's where the, the note taking goes. [00:40:25] Nadia: Your. [00:40:27] Ben: yeah, exactly. So sort of down another separate track is, is something that I've noticed is like, [00:40:35] I guess, how do you think about what is and is not a public good? And I, and I asked this because I think my experience talking to many people in, in tech there's, there's sort of this attitude that sort of everything can be made like that, that almost like public goods don't exist. That it's like every, like everything can, can sort of be done by a, for profit company. And if like you can't capture the value of what you're doing it might not be valuable. [00:41:06] Nadia: Yeah, that's a frustrating one. Yeah, I mean like public goods have a very literal and simple economic definition of being a, a good that is non rivals and non-excludable so non excludable, meaning that you can't prevent anyone from accessing it and non rivals, meaning that if someone uses the public good, it doesn't diminish someone else's ability to use that, that public good. And that sort of stands in contrast to private goods and other types of goods. So, you know, there's that definition to start with, but then of course in [00:41:35] real life, real life is much more complex than that. Right. And so I, I noticed there was like a lot of, yeah, just like assumptions. I get rolled up in that. So like one of the things. Open source code, for example in the book that I wrote I tried to sort of like break apart, like people think of open source code as a public. Good. And that's it. Right. And, and with that carries a bunch of implications around, well, if open source is, you know, freely accessible, it's not excludable. That means that we should not prevent anyone from contributing to it. And that's like, you know, then, then that leads to all these sort of like management problems. And so I kind of try to break that apart and say the consumption of open source code. Like the, the actual code itself can be a public good that is freely accessible, but then the production of open source, like who actually contributes to an open source community could be, you know, like more like a membership style community where you do exclude people. That's just, you know, one example that comes to mind of like how public goods are not as black and white as they seem. I think another, like assumption that I see is that public goods have to be funded by government. And government has again, [00:42:35] like, you know, Especially since mid 19 hundreds, like been kinda like primary provider of public goods, but there are also public goods that are privately funded. Like, you know like roads can be funded through public private partnerships or privately funded. So it's not just because something is a public good. Doesn't say anything about how it has to be funded. So yeah, there, there is just sort of like, and then, yeah, as you're saying within tech, I think there's just because the vehicle of change in the world that is sort of like the defining vehicle for the tech industry is startups. Right. And so it's both like understandable why like everything gets filtered through that lens of like, why is it not a startup? But then, you know, as, as we both know, kind of minimizes the text history, the reason that we even, you know, got to the commercial era of startups and the startup. Era is because of the years and years of academic and government funded research that, that led up to that. So and, and then, and same with sort of like the open source work that I [00:43:35] was doing was to say, okay, all these companies that are developing their software products, every single one of these private companies is using open source code. They're relying on this public digital infrastructure to build their software. So like, it's, it's not quite as clean cut as especially, I mean, by some estimates, like a vast majority of let's say, yeah, any, any private company, any private software company, like, you know, let's say like 70% of their, their code or, you know, it's, it varies so much between companies, but like certainly a majority of the code that is quote unquote written is actually just like shared public code. So it's, you know it's, it's not quite as simple as saying like public goods have no place in, in tech. I think they, they still have a very, very strong place. [00:44:16] Ben: Yeah, no, and it it's, it's also just, just thinking about like, sort of like the, the publicness of different things, right? Cuz it's like, there are for profit, there, there are profitable private schools. Right. And yet, [00:44:35] like I think most people would agree that. If all schools were, were for profit and private I mean, yeah, I guess separating out like the, the, like, even if schools were for profit and private you would prob like, it would probably still be a good thing to have government getting money into those schools. Right. Like even like, I, I think people who don't like public schooling still think that it is worthwhile for the government to give money towards schools. Right. [00:45:12] Nadia: Mm-hmm [00:45:13] Ben: Is that [00:45:14] Nadia: Yeah. And, and this is a distinction between, for the example of education, it's like, you know, the concept of education might be a public. Good. But then how is education funded might, you know, get funded in different ways, including private. [00:45:27] Ben: yeah, exactly. And, and, and I. Yeah. So, so the, the, the concept of education [00:45:35] as, as a public good. Yeah, that's a, that's a good way of putting it and there's like, but I, and I think, I guess there, there are, there are more I guess think fuzzier places where it's like, it's less clear whe like, to what extent it's to public good, like like I think infrastructure maybe one where it's like, you, you could imagine a system where like, everybody just like, who uses, say like a sewer line buys into it versus having it be, be publicly funded. And I think like research might be another one. [00:46:11] Nadia: I mean, even education is if you go far back enough, right? Like not everyone went to public schools before. Not everyone got an education. It was not seen as necessarily something that it was something for like privileged people to get. It was not something that was just like part of the public sector. So yeah, our, our notions of what the public sector even is, or what's in and out of it is definitely evolved over the years. [00:46:32] Ben: Yeah, no, that's a really good point. So it's, [00:46:35] it's like that again is like, that's, that's where it's complicated where it's like, it's not just some like attribute of the world. Right. It's like our, like some kind of social consensus, [00:46:45] Nadia: Great. [00:46:46] Ben: around public goods. And, and something I also wanted to, to talk about is like, I know you've been thinking a lot about like the, sort of the relationship between philanthropy and status and I guess like, do, do you have, like, what's like. Do do you have a sense of like, why? Like, and it's different for everybody, but like why do people do philanthropy now? Like when you, when you don't have like a, a sort of like a, a reli, excuse me, a religious mandate to do it. [00:47:21] Nadia: I actually think, yeah, I think this question is more complicated than it seems. Because there's so many different types of philanthropists you know, The old adage of, if you've met one philanthropist, you've met one philanthropist. And so motivations [00:47:35] are, I mean, there are a lot of different motivations and also just sort of like, there's some spectrum here that I am still kind of lack and vocabulary on, but like a lot of philanthropy, if you just look by the numbers, like a lot of philanthropy is done at the local level, right. Or it's done within a philanthropy sort of local sphere. Like we forget about, you know, when you think about philanthropy, you think about the biggest billionaires in the world. You think about bill gates or Warren buffet or whatever. But like, we forget that, you know, there are a lot of people that are wealthy that are just kind of like that, that aren't part of the quote unquote global elite. Right? So like I, yeah, one example I have to think about is like the, the Koch family. And and so we all know the Koch brothers, but then like, They were, they were not the original philanthropist in their family. Their father was, and their father was originally, I mean, they had a family foundation and they just kind of focused on their local area doing local philanthropy. And it was only with the next generation that they ended up sort of like expanding into this like more global focus. But like, yeah, I mean, there's so much philanthropy. That is, so when we say, you know, like, what are the motivations of someone of a philanthropist? Like, it, it really [00:48:35] depends on like who you're talking about. But I do think like one aspect that just gets really under discussed or underappreciated philanthropy is the kind of like cohort nature of at least philanthropy that operates on a more like global, global skill. And I don't mean literally global in the sense of like international, I just mean like, I don't know what the right term is for this, but like outside of your yeah, like nonlocal right. [00:48:59] Ben: Yeah. [00:49:00] Nadia: And yeah, I don't know. That feels unsatisfying too. I don't really know what, what, what the term is, but there is a distinction there, right. But yeah, I think like, well, yeah, I don't know. I don't know what the right term is. But like I, the, the ways in which, so like, you know, why does a, why does a philanthropist? I, I think I have one open question of like, why, what makes a philanthropist convert from kinda like the more local focus to some expanded quote unquote global focus is one question. I think like when people talk about the motivations of philanthropists, they tend to focus on individual motivations of that person. So, you [00:49:35] know, the classic answer to like, why do, why do people give philanthropically? It's always like something like about altruism and wanting to give back or it's, or it's like the, you know, the, the edgy self-interested model of like, you know, people that are motivated by, by status and wanting to look good. I don't, I feel like those answers, they don't, they're not like they're just not fully satisfying to me. I think there's. This aspect of maybe like, like a more like power relational theory that is maybe under, under discussed or underappreciated of if you think about like like these wealth generations, rather than just like individuals who are wealthy you can see these sort of like cohorts of people that all became wealthy in similar sorts of ways. So you have wall street wealth, you have tech wealth, you have crypto wealth. And and you know, these are very large buckets, but you can sort of group people together based on like, they got wealthy because they had some unique insight that the previous paradigm did not have. And I think like, [00:50:35] there's sort of like, yeah, there are these cycles that like wealth is moving in where first you're sort of like the outcast you're working outta your garage, you know, let's use the startup example. No one really cares about you. You're very counterculture. Then you become sort of like more popular you're you're like a, but you're still like a counterculture for people that are like in the know, right. You're showing traction, you're showing promise whatever, and then there's some explosion to the mean stream. There's sort of this like frenzied period where everyone wants to, you know, do startups or join a startup or start a startup. And then there's sort of like the crash, right? And this is this mirrors Carla press's technological revolutions and, and financial capital where she talks about how technological innovations influence financial markets. But you know, she talks about these sort like cycles that we move in. And then like, after the sort of like crash, there's like a backlash, right? There's like a reckoning where the public says, you know, how, how could we have been misled by this, these crazy new people or whatever. But that moment is actually the moment in which the, the new paradigm starts to like cement its power and starts to become sort of like, you know, the dominant force in the field. It needs to start. [00:51:35] Switching over and thinking about their public legacy. But I think like one learnings we can have from looking at startup wealth now and sort of like how interesting it is that in the last couple years, like suddenly a lot of people in tech are starting to think about culture building and institution building and, and their public legacies that wasn't true. Like, you know, 10 years ago, what is actually changed. And I think a lot of that really was influenced by the, the tech backlash that was experienced in, in 2016 or so. And so you look at these initiatives now, like there are multiple examples of like philanthropic initiatives that are happening now. And I don't find it satisfying to just say, oh, it's because these individuals want to have a second act in their career. Or because they're motivated by status. Like, I think those are certainly all components of it, but it doesn't really answer the question of why are so many people doing it together right now? Not literally coordinated together, but like it's happening independently in a lot of different places. And so I feel like we need some kind of. Cohort analysis or cohort explanation to say, okay, I actually think this is kind of like a defense mechanism because you have this [00:52:35] clash between like a rising new paradigm against the incumbents and the new paradigm needs to find ways to, you know, like wield its influence in the public sector or else it's just gonna be, you know, regulated out of existence or they're gonna, you know, be facing this sort of like hostile media landscape. They need to learn how to actually like put their fingers into that and and, and grapple with the role. But it it's this sort of like coming of age for our counterculture where they're used to, like tech is used to sort of being in this like safe enclave in Silicon valley and is now being forced or like reckoned with the outside world. So like that, that, that is one answer for me of like, why do philanthropists do these things? It's we can talk about sort of like individual motivations for any one person. In, in my sort of like particular area of interest in trying to understand, like, why is tech wealth doing this? Or like, what will crypto wealth be doing in the future? I, I find that kind of explanation. Helpful. [00:53:25] Ben: Yeah. That's I feel like it has a very like Peter Turin vibe like in, in the good way, in the sense of like, like identifying. [00:53:35] like, I, I, I don't think that history is predictive, but I do think that there are patterns that repeat and like that, like, I've never heard anybody point out that pattern, but it feels really truthy to me. I think the, the, the really cool thing to do would be to like, sort of, as you dig into this, like, sort of like set up some kind of like bet with yourself on like, what are the conditions under which like crypto people will become like start heavily going into philanthropy. Right. Like, [00:54:09] Nadia: Yes, totally. I think about this now. That's why I'm like, I'm weirdly, like, to me, crypto wealth is the specter in the future, but they're not actually in the same boat as what tech wealth is in right now. So I'm almost in a, like, they're, they're not yet really motivated to deal with this stuff, because I think like that moment, if I had to like, make a bet on it is like, it's gonna be the moment where like crypto, when, when crypto really faces like a public [00:54:35] backlash. Because right now I think they're still in the like we're counterculture, but we're cool kind of moment. And then they had a little bit of this frenzy in the crash, but like, yeah, I think it's still. [00:54:44] Ben: for tech, right? Or 2000. [00:54:46] Nadia: Yeah. And even despite exactly. And, and, and despite the, you know, same as in 2001 where people were like, ah, pets.com, you know, it was all a scam. This was all bullshit. Oh, sorry. I dunno if I could say that. [00:54:57] Ben: Say that. [00:54:57] Nadia: But then, you know, like did not even, like startups had a whole other Renaissance after that was like not, you know, far from being over. But like people still by and large, like love crypto. And like, there are the, you know, loud, negative people that are criticizing it in the same way that people criticize startups in 2001. But like by and large, a lot of people are still engaging with it and are interested in it. And so, like, I don't feel like it's hit that public backlash moment yet the way that startups did in 2016. So I feel like once it gets to that point and then like, kind of the reckoning after that is kind of the point where crypto wealth will be motivated to act philanthropically in kind of like this larger cohort [00:55:35] kind of way. [00:55:36] Ben: Yeah. And I don't think that the time scales will be the same, but I mean the time scale for, for that in tech, if we sort of like map it on to the, the 2000 crash is like, you know, so you have like 15 years. So like, that'd be like 20 37 is when we need to like Peck back in and see like, okay, is this right? [00:55:56] Nadia: It's gonna be faster. So I'm gonna cut that in half or something. I feel like the cycles are getting shorter and moving faster. [00:56:01] Ben: That, that, that definitely feels true. Looking to the future is, is a a good place for us to, to wrap up. I really appreciate this.
Charlie (@Charlie_likes_coks), professional gun scientist of Garand Thumb fame sits down with Nathan to discuss a little bit of everything! Nathan opens talking bout being radicalized by r/weekendgunnit, Charlie discusses his Gay Glock, fighting against NATO at MilSim West and trolling players with ‘intel', the pros and cons of being a shooter in the PNW and the community up in Washington, talk ancestors simping for the crown, Nathan finally makes ‘the broadcast' to fellow Canucks and gets real with Charlie on what modern Canadian gun culture looks like on the ground. Nathan touches on growing up very Asian, his family escaping the purges in China, has a flashback to being forced to learn Cantonese in a Buddhist temple as a kid by monks and touches on the availability of Night Vision in Canada. Also: Being mistaken for Micah, [B]ointing at Benis and ret*rd awards, F List Gunstagram fame, Canadian healthcare, marrying for Greencards and kissing the homies goodnight, the NRA never changing, French Canadian racism and much more! Links mentioned in this episode: Check out Charlie on Instagram here! Check out our Patreon here to support what we do and get insider perks! Follow the lads on IG: https://www.instagram.com/cbrnart/?hl=en Follow the lads on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CBRNDad Check out our sponsors: Use code: ARTANDWAR10 for $10 off an SMU Belt at AWSin.com Use code: ARTANDWAR for 5% off at midwestgunworks.com Check out our link tree for the rest of our stuff!
Ms. Arntzen, an educator & Director of the Montana's Office of Public Instruction, is notorious for her inability to use grammatically correct language, her refusal to educate herself on Land Board issues, & now notorious for violating the laws she advocates for. SHOW NOTES: Music by: Intro: Lose Control, by AlexiAction Outro: News Corporate, by Skilsel Both music selections are royalty free on Pixabay LINKS: https://dailyinterlake.com/news/2021/feb/24/flathead-locals-testify-support-school-bus-safety-/ https://mtstandard.com/about-elsie-arntzen/article_23f2ea14-8580-11e3-b596-0019bb2963f4.html https://helenair.com/news/local/arntzen-adviser-makes-40-more-per-hour-than-his-boss-but-works-much-less/article_2c252307-3c1b-5896-b862-4953714ed795.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21150235-school-superintendents-letter-to-superintendent-elsie-arntzen DISCLAIMER: These podcasts are in no way endorsed by the creators of the media used within, nor are they intended to undermine or compete with any material existing or forthcoming material. Copyright disclaimer under Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 - allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research. Fair Use, us a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational, or personal use tips the balance in favor of Fair Use. No copyright infringement is intended. All audio clips used in these podcasts are not intended to infringe.
On this episode of Investor Connect, Hall welcomes Bill Flynn, CEO, and Chief Catalyst at Catalyst Growth Advisors. Started in 2016, Catalyst Growth Advisors is based in Boston, MA, and serves leaders worldwide by predicting the future through deliberately creating it, leveraging, and teaching a growth framework largely influenced by the greatest thought leaders in management science - Drucker, Deming, Schein, Benis, Moesta, Edmondson, among many others. Bill has collaborated with Alan Mulally, pitched Steve Jobs, accomplished much, failed often, and learned many useful lessons from thirty years of studying the science of success. He is best described as a pragmatic Simon Sinek; an optimist and an operator. Bill embodies his core purpose - simplified servanthood - by spending each working moment to help create a compassionately productive society by enabling enlightened leaders to focus on the few things that truly matter to their teams and key stakeholders. For having a great business is one way of making a better world. He has worked for and advised hundreds of companies, including startups, where he has a long track record of success spanning multiple industries. Bill has been a VP of Sales eight times, twice a CMO, and once a GM of a division of a $100MM IT services company before he pivoted to becoming a business growth coach in 2015. Prior to that, he had five successful outcomes, two IPOs, and seven acquisitions, including a turnaround during the 2008 financial crisis. As a coach, in addition to being connected with MG 100, Women's Business Collaborative, MassMEP, Small Giants, and EforAll, Bill has earned certifications from ScalingUp, Gravitas Impact, Metronome United, Predictive Index, and The Neuroleadership Institute. Bill was also nominated for the 2021 Thinkers50 Radar Award. Bill's best-selling book, “Further, Faster - The Vital Few Steps that Take the Guesswork out of Growth”, continues to garner a nearly 5-star rating generating demand for virtual and in-person national and international speaking opportunities. Away from his coaching, Bill is a father, learner, cultivator, entrepreneur, speaker, writer, athlete, brother, etiologist, iconoclast, Stoic, upstream thinker, builder, giver, "musician", and friend. When he is not cheering on his collegiate-champion, musically-gifted daughter, Bill lives and works in greater Boston.Bill discusses why companies survive or flourish and why leaders fire themselves from the day-to-day running of their businesses. He speaks about a chapter in his book, “Create a Culture of Psychological Safety”, and which leader has inspired him the most in his journey. You can visit Catalyst Growth Advisors at . Bill can be contacted at , on LinkedIn at , and on Twitter at . ____________________________________________________________________ For more episodes from Investor Connect, please visit the site at: Check out our other podcasts here: For Investors check out: For Startups check out: For eGuides check out: For upcoming Events, check out For Feedback please contact info@tencapital.group Please , share, and leave a review. Music courtesy of .
Benis Reffkin is forging her own path for a life of fulfillment and impact as a certified Executive Coach focused on helping clients in Life & Leadership, working primarily with entrepreneurs and their growth ambitions. To guide clients she draws from her work experiences in executive recruiting, private wealth management and leadership consulting, as well as her MBA from Columbia Business School and BA in Psychology from NYU. She is also a hands-on mother-of-three young children, and supports her husband as an advisor and coach as he founded the real estate tech company Compass.Her website is: https://www.benisreffkincoaching.com/
Bepis, Benis, and Conke, a new invitation to support our show, liminal spaces, Video Center's special corner, peckers vs peppers, and how long it takes to give up on harvesting the platinum, iridium, and palladium from catalytic converters. Links: Please give us money (click “Support”) Liminal spaces More liminal spaces Catalytic Converter Platinum Removal Episode music: The Last Moment of the First Day --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/gutterballs/support
Escucha la entrevista a... Rodolfo Pila y Benis Gudiño en La Hora del Bitute. Que nos acompañó en nuestra barra de FIL Joven en la Edición FIL 35, donde Perú fue nuestro Invitado de Honor. Conducción: Paul Carrillo, Michelle Cano, Gustavo Zapata y Cindy Barajas. Edición: Martin Cordero. Producción: Carolina Fausto.
I Finnjävlarpodden delar den nyligen avlidne musikern Benjamin "Benis" Vallé med sig av sina tankar kring livet, sin uppväxt och punkscenen i Linköping. Han berättar även om sina finska och engelska rötter. Benjamin Vallé var en av grundarna till det svenska postpunkbandet Viagra Boys med låtframgångar som Sports, Aint Nice och Research Chemicals. I detta avsnitt fick Victoria och Kristian möjlighet att lära känna Benis lite bättre. Aktivisten, feministen, låtskrivaren och gitarristen berättar om livet som punkare i Linköping och varför är det finska utrycket "oho" så bra.Programmet spelades in i maj 2021 i StockholmProgramledare Victoria Rixer och Kristian BorgProducent Liisa Tolonen liisa.tolonen@sverigesradio.se
I Finnjävlarpodden delar den nyligen avlidne musikern Benjamin "Benis" Vallé med sig av sina tankar kring livet, sin uppväxt och punkscenen i Linköping. Han berättar även om sina finska och engelska rötter. Benjamin Vallé var en av grundarna till det svenska postpunkbandet Viagra Boys med låtframgångar som Sports, Aint Nice och Research Chemicals. I detta avsnitt fick Victoria och Kristian möjlighet att lära känna Benis lite bättre. Aktivisten, feministen, låtskrivaren och gitarristen berättar om livet som punkare i Linköping och varför är det finska utrycket "oho" så bra.Programmet spelades in i maj 2021 i StockholmProgramledare Victoria Rixer och Kristian BorgProducent Liisa Tolonen liisa.tolonen@sverigesradio.se
Who is Bill Benis? If you have followed him for any amount of time, this is certainly a question I'm sure you have asked. Well now I have @Big_Bayn joining me on the show for a deep dive behind the scenes on all things Bill Benis. This is a can't miss! @Brianbreakerodr on twitter @brianbreaker on Instagram ProWrestlingTees.com/brianbreaker Bbph.redbubble.com Whatamaneuver.net Patreon.com/Bbph (if decide to support me and Bayn with production costs to produce these shows) Also check out Breaker and Bayn's Power Hour every Sunday! And my new toy podcast TB Toycast every Thursday! Available wherever you get your podcasts! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Cameron talks with Jordan Benis, Director of Strategy and Operations at Federated Mortgage Corp. and a former Performance Management Director at PNC. Jordan talks about his experiences and success with simplifying the message of change, and we find out that surveys may not exactly be the best tool for feedback.
OTS talks about their favorite school lunches, DCOM's and make penis jokes for about five minutes straight.
Tracy Lee: @ladyleet | ladyleet.com Ben Lesh: @benlesh | medium.com/@benlesh Show Notes: 00:50 - What is This Dot? 03:26 - The RxJS 5.5.4 Release and Characterizing RxJS 05:14 - Observable 07:06 - Operators 09:52 - Learning RxJS 11:10 - Making RxJS Functional Programming Friendly 12:52 - Lettable Operators 15:14 - Pipeline Operators 21:33 - The Concept of Mappable 23:58 - Struggles While Learning RxJS 33:09 - Documentation 36:52 - Surprising Uses of Observables 40:27 - Weird Uses of RxJS 45:25 - Announcements: WHATWG to Include Observables and RxJS 6 Resources: this.media RxJS RX Workshop Ben Lesh: Hot vs Cold Observables learnrxjs.io RxMarbles Jewelbots Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 91. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer here at The Frontside and your podcast host-in-training. Joining me today on the podcast is Elrick Ryan. Hello, Elrick. ELRICK: Hey, what's up? CHARLES: Not much. How are you doing? ELRICK: I'm great. Very excited to have these two folks on the podcast today. I feel like I know them… CHARLES: [Laughs] ELRICK: Very well, from Twitter. CHARLES: I feel like I know them well from Twitter, too. ELRICK: [Laughs] CHARLES: But I also feel like this is a fantastic company that is doing a lot of great stuff. ELRICK: Yup. CHARLES: Also not in Twitter. It should be pointed out. We have with us Tracy Lee and Ben Lesh from This Dot company. TRACY: Hey. CHARLES: So first of all, why don't we start, for those who don't know, what exactly is This Dot? What is it that you all do and what are you hoping to accomplish? TRACY: This Dot was created about a year ago. And it was founded by myself and Taras who work on it full-time. And we have amazing people like Ben, who's also one of our co-founders, and really amazing mentors. A lot of our friends, when they refer to what we actually do, they like to call it celebrity consulting. [Laughter] TRACY: Which I think is hilarious. But it's basically core contributors of different frameworks and libraries who work with us and lend their time to mentor and consult with different companies. So, I think the beautiful part about what we're trying to do is bring together the web. And we sort of do that as well not only through consulting and trying to help people succeed, but also through This Dot Media where it's basically a big playground of JavaScripting all the things. Ben and I do Modern Web podcast together. We do RX Workshop which is RxJS training together. And Ben also has a full-time job at Google. CHARLES: What do they got you doing over there at Google? BEN: Well, I work on a project called Alkali which is an internal platform as a service built on top of Angular. That's my day job. CHARLES: So, you've been actually involved in all the major front-end frameworks, right, at some point? BEN: Yeah, yes. I got my start with Angular 1 or AngularJS now, when I was working as a web developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at a company called Aesynt which was formerly McKesson Automation. And then I was noticed by Netflix who was starting to do some Angular 1 work and they hired me to come help them. And then they decided to do Ember which is fine. And I worked on a large Ember app there. Then I worked on a couple of large React apps at Netflix. And now I'm at Google building Angular apps. CHARLES: Alright. BEN: Which is Angular 5 now, I believe. CHARLES: So, you've come the full circle. BEN: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. CHARLES: [Chuckles] I have to imagine Angular's changed a lot since you were working on it the first time. BEN: Yeah. It was completely rewritten. TRACY: I feel like Angular's the new Ember. CHARLES: Angular is the new Ember? TRACY: [Laughs] BEN: You think? TRACY: Angular is the new Ember and Vue is the new AngularJS, is basically. [Laughs] CHARLES: Okay. [Laughter] CHARLES: What's the new React then? BEN: Preact would be the React. CHARLES: Preact? Okay, or is Glimmer… BEN: [Laughs] I'm just… CHARLES: Is Glimmer the new React? BEN: Oh, sure. [Laughs] CHARLES: It's important to keep these things straight in your head. BEN: Yeah, yeah. CHARLES: Saves on confusion. TRACY: Which came first? [Chuckles] BEN: Too late. I'm already confused. CHARLES: So now, before the show you were saying that you had just, literally just released RxJS, was it 5.5.4? BEN: That's right. That's right. The patch release, yeah. CHARLES: Okay. Am I also correct in understanding that RxJS has kind of come to very front and center position in Angular? Like they've built large portions of framework around it? BEN: Yeah, it's the only dependency for Angular. It is being used in a lot of official space for Angular. For example, Angular Material's Data Table uses observables which are coming from RxJS. They've got reactive forms. The router makes use of Observable. So, the integration started kind of small which HTTPClient being written around Observable. And it's grown from there as people seem to be grabbing on and enjoying more the React programming side of things. So, it's definitely the one framework that's really embraced reactive programming outside of say, Cycle.js or something like that. CHARLES: Mmhmm. So, just to give a general background, how would you characterize RxJS? BEN: It's a library built around Observable. And Observable is a push-based primitive that gives you sets of events, really. CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: So, that's like Lodash for events would be a good way to put it. You can take anything that you can get pushed at you, which is pretty much value type you can imagine, and wrap it in an observable and have it pushed out of the observable. And from there, you have a set of things that you can combine. And you can concatenate them, you can filter them, you can transform them, you can combine them with other sets, and so on. So, you've got this ability to query and manipulate in a declarative way, events. CHARLES: Now, Observable is also… So, when Jay was on the podcast we were talking about Redux observable. But there was outside of the context of RxJS, it was just observables were this standalone entity. But I understand that they actually came from the RxJS project. That was the progenitor of observables even though there's talk of maybe making them part of the JavaScript spec. BEN: Yeah, that's right. That's right. So, RxJS as it stands is a reference implementation for what could land in JavaScript or what could even land in the DOM as far as an observable type. Observable itself is very primitive but RxJS has a lot of operators and optimizations and things written around Observable. That's the entire purpose of the library. CHARLES: Mmhmm. So, what kind of value-adds does it provide on top of Observable? If Observable was the primitive, what are the combinators, so to speak? BEN: Oh, right. So, similar to what Lodash would add on top of say, an iterable or arrays, you would have the same sorts of things and more inside of RxJS. So, you've got zip which you would maybe have seen in Lodash or different means of combines. Of course, map and ‘merge map' which is like a flattening sort of operation. You can concatenate them together. But you also have these time-based things. You can do debouncing or throttling of events as they're coming over in observable and you create a new observable of that. So, the value-add is the ability to compose these primitive actions. You can take on an observable and make a new observable. We call it operators. And you can use those operators to build pretty much anything you can imagine as far as an app would go. CHARLES: So, do you find that most of the time all of the operators are contained right there inside RxJS? Or if you're going to be doing reactive programming, one of your tasks is going to be defining your own operators? BEN: No, pretty much everything you'd need will be defined within RxJS. There's 60 operators or so. CHARLES: Whoa, that's a lot. BEN: It's unlikely that someone's going to come up with one. And in fact, I would say the majority of those, probably 75% of those, you can create from the other 25%. So, some of the much more primitive operators could be used… TRACY: Which is sort of what Ben did in this last release, RxJS 5…. I don't know remember when you introduced the lettable operators but you… BEN: Yeah, 5.5. TRACY: Implemented [inaudible] operators. BEN: Yeah, so a good portion of them I started implementing in terms of other operators. CHARLES: Right. So, what was that? I didn't quite catch that, Tracy. You said that, what was the operator that was introduced? TRACY: So, in one of the latest releases of RxJS, one of the more significant releases where pipeable operators were introduced, what Ben did was he went ahead and implemented a lot of operators that were currently in the library in terms of other operators, which was able to give way to reduce the size of the library from, I think it was what, 30KB bundled, gzipped, and minified, to about 30KB, which was about 60 to 70% of the operators. Right, Ben? BEN: Yeah. So, the size reduction was in part that there's a lot of factors that went into the size reduction. It would be kind of hard to pin it down to a specific operator. But I know that some of the operators like the individual operators themselves, by reimplementing reduce which is the same as doing as scan and then take last, implementing it in terms of that is going to reduce the size of it probably 90% of that one particular file. So, there's a variety of things like that that have already started and that we're going to continue to do. We didn't do it with every operator that we could have. Some operators are very, very common and consequently we want them to be as optimized as possible. For example, map. You can implement map in terms of ‘merge map' but it would be very slow to do so. It might be smaller but it would be slower. We don't want that. So, there are certain areas we're always going to try to keep fairly a hot path to optimize them as much as possible. But in other spots like reduce which is less common and isn't usually considered to be a performance bottleneck, we can cut some corners. Or ‘to array' or other things like that. CHARLES: Mmhmm. TRACY: And I think another really interesting thing is a lot of people when learning RxJS, they… it's funny because we just gave an RX Workshop course this past weekend and the people that were there just were like, “Oh, we've heard of RxJS. We think it's a cool new thing. We have no plans to implement it in real life but let's just play around with it and let me learn it.” I think as people are starting to learn RxJS, one of the things that gets them really overwhelmed is this whole idea that they're having to learn a completely new language on top of JavaScript or what operators to use. And one of our friends, Brian Troncone who is on the Learning Team, the RxJS Learning Team, he pulled up the top 15 operators that were most commonly searched on his site. And some of them were ‘switch map', ‘merge map', ‘fork join', merge, et cetera. So, you can sort of tell that even though the library has quite a few… it's funny because Ben, I think the last RX Workshop you were using pairs and you had never used it before. BEN: Yeah. TRACY: So, it's always amusing for me how many people can be on the core team but have never implemented RxJS… CHARLES: [Laughs] TRACY: A certain way. BEN: Right. Right, right, right. CHARLES: You had said one of the recent releases was about making it more friendly for functional programming. Is that a subject that we can explore? Because using observables is already pretty FP-like. BEN: What it was before is we had dot chaining. So, you would do ‘dot map' and then call a method and then you get an observable back. And then you'd say ‘dot merge' and then you'd call a method on that, and so on and so forth. Now what you have is kind of a Ramda JS style pipe function that just takes a comma-separated list of other functions that are going to act upon the observable. So, it reads pretty much the same with a little more ceremony around it I guess. But the upside is that you can develop your operators as just higher-order functions. CHARLES: Right. And you don't have to do any monkey-patching of prototypes. BEN: Exactly, exactly. CHARLES: Because actually, okay, I see. This is actually pretty exciting, I think. Because we actually ran into this problem when we were using Redux Observable where we wanted to use some operators that were used by some library but we had to basically make a pull request upstream, or fork the upstream library to include the operators so that we could use them in our application. It was really weird. BEN: Yeah. CHARLES: The reason was because it was extending the observable prototype. BEN: Yeah. And there's so many… and that's one way to add that, is you extend the observable prototype and then you override lift so you return the same type of observable everywhere. And there are so many things that lettable operators solved for us. For example… CHARLES: So, lettable operators. So, that's the word that Tracy used and you just used it. What are lettable operators? BEN: Well, I've been trying to say pipeable and get that going instead of lettable. But basically there's an operator on RxJS that's been there forever called let. And let is an operator and what you do is you give it a function. And the function gives you the source observable and you're expected to return a new observable. And the idea is that you can then write a function elsewhere that you can then compose in as though it were an operator, anywhere you want, along with your other dot-chained operators. And the realization I had a few months ago was, “Well, why don't we just make all operators like this?” And then we can use functional programming to compose them with like a reduce or whatever. And that's exactly what the lettable operators are. And that's why I started calling them lettable operators. And I kind of regret it now, because so many people are saying it and it confuses new people. Because what in the world does lettable even mean? CHARLES: Right. [Laughs] BEN: So, they are pipeable operators or functional operators. But the point is that you have a higher-order function that returns a function of a specific shape. And that function shape is, it's a function that receives an observable and returns an observable, and that's it. So, basically it's a function that transforms an observable into a new observable. That's all an operator. That's all an operator's ever been. It's just this is in a different flavor. CHARLES: Now, I'm curious. Why does it do an observable into an observable and not a stream item into an observable? Because when you're actually chaining these things together, like with a map or with a ‘flat map' or all these things, you're actually getting an individual item and then returning an observable. Well, I guess in this case of a map you're getting an item and returning an item. But like… BEN: Right, but that's not what the entire operation is. So, you've got an operation you're performing whenever you say, if you're to just even dot-chain it, you'd say ‘observable dot map'. And when you say ‘dot map', it returns a new observable. And then you say ‘dot filter' and it returns another new observable. CHARLES: Oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. BEN: So, this function just embodies that step. CHARLES: I see, I see. And isn't there some special… I feel like there's some proposal for some special JavaScript syntax to make this type of chaining? BEN: Yeah, yeah, the pipeline operator. CHARLES: Okay. BEN: I don't know. I think that's still at stage one. I don't know that it's got a lot of headway. My sources and friends that are in the TC39 seem to think that it doesn't have a lot of headway. But I really think it's important. Because if you look at… the problem is we're using a language where the most common use case is you have to build it, get the size as small as possible because you need to send it over the wire to the browser. And understandably, browsers don't want to implement every possible method they could on say, Array, right? CHARLES: Mmhmm, right. BEN: There's a proposal in for ‘flat map'. They could add zip to Array. They could add all sorts of interesting things to Array just by itself. And that's why Lodash exists, right? CHARLES: Right. BEN: Is because not everything is on Array. And then so, the onus is then put on the community to come up with these solutions and the community has to build libraries that have these constraints in size. And what stinks about that is then you have say, an older version of Lodash where you'd be like, “Okay, well it has 36 different functions in it and I'm only using 3 of them. And I have to ship them all to the browser.” CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: And that's not what you want. So, then we have these other solutions around tree-shaking and this and that. And the real thing is what you want is you want to be able to compose things left to right and you want to be able to have these functions that you can use on a particular type in an ad hoc way. And there's been two proposals to try to address this. One was the ‘function bind' operator, CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: Which is colon colon. And what that did is it said, “You can use this function as a method, as though it were a method on an object. And we'll make sure that the ‘this' inside that function comes from the instance that's on the left-hand side of colon colon.” CHARLES: Right. BEN: That had a bunch of other problems. Like there's some real debate I guess on how they would tie that down to a specific type. So, that kind of fell dead in the water even though it had made some traction. And then the pipeline operator is different. And then what it says is, “Okay, whatever is on the…” And what it looks like is a pipe and a greater than right next to each other. And whatever's on the left-hand side of that operand gets passed as the first argument to the function on the right-hand side of that operand. CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: And so, what that means is for the pipeable operators, instead of having to use a pipe method on observable, you can just say, “instance of observable, pipeline operator and an operator, and then pipeline operator, and then the Rx operator, and then pipeline operator and the Rx operator, and so on.” And it would just be built-in. And the reason I think that JavaScript really needs it is that means that libraries like Lodash can be written in terms of simple functions and shipped piece-meal to the browser exactly as you need them. And people would just use the pipeline operator to use them, instead of having to wrap something in a big object so you can dot-chain things together or come up with your own functional pipe thing like RxJS had to. CHARLES: Right. Because it seems it happens again and again, right? Lodash, RxJS, jQuery. You just see this pattern of chaining, which is, you know… BEN: Yeah, yeah. People want chaining. People want left to right composition. CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: And it's problematic in a world where you want to shake off as much unused garbage as possible. And the only way to get dot chaining is by augmenting a prototype. There's all sorts of weird problems that can come with that. And so, the functional programming approach is one method. But then people look at it and they say, “Ooh, yuck. I've got to wrap things in a function named pipe. Wouldn't it be nicer if there was just some syntax to do this?” And yeah, it would be nicer. But I have less control over that. CHARLES: Right. But the other alternative is to have right to left function composition. BEN: Right, yeah. CHARLES: But there's not any special syntax for that, either. BEN: Not very readable. CHARLES: Yeah. BEN: So, you just wrap everything. And the innermost call is the first one and then you wrap it in another function and you wrap that in another function, and so on. Yeah, that's not [inaudible]. But I will say that the pipe function itself is pretty simple. It's basically a function that takes a rest of arguments that are all functions. CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: And so, you have this array of functions and you just reduce over it and call them. Well, you return a function. So, it's a higher function. You return a function that takes an argument then you reduce over the functions that came in as arguments and you call each one of them with whatever result was from the previous. CHARLES: Right. Like Tracy mentioned in the pre-show, I'm an aspiring student of functional programming. So, would this be kind of like a monoid here where you're mashing all these functions together? Is your empty value? I'm just going to throw it out there. I don't know if it's true or not, but that's my conjecture. BEN: Yes. Technically, it's a monoid because it wouldn't work unless it was a monoid. Because monoids, I believe the category theory I think for monoid is that monoids can be concatenated because they definitely have an end. CHARLES: Right. BEN: So, you would not be able to reduce over all those functions and build something with that, like that, unless it was a monoid. So yeah, the fact that there's reduction involved is a cue that it's a monoid. CHARLES: Woohoo! Alright. [Laughter] CHARLES: Have you found yourself wanting to apply some of these more “rigorous” formalisms that you find out there in the development of RxJS or is that just really a secondary concern? BEN: It's a secondary concern. It's not something that I like. It's something I think about from time to time, when really, debating any kind of heavy issue, sometimes it's helpful. But when it comes to teaching anybody anything, honestly the Haskell-isms and category theory names, all they do is just confuse people. And if you tell somebody something is a functor, they're like, “What?” And if you just say it's mappable, they're like, “Oh, okay. I can map that.” CHARLES: [Laughs] Right, right. BEN: And then the purists would be like, “But they're not the same thing.” And I would be like, “But the world doesn't care. I'm sorry.” CHARLES: Yeah, yeah. I'm kind of experiencing this debate myself. I'm not quite sure which side I fall on, because on the one hand it is arbitrary. Functor is a weird name. But I wish the concept of mappable existed. It does, but I feel like it would be handy if people… because there's literally five things that are super handy, right? Like mappable, if we could have a name for monoid. But it's like, really, you just need to think in terms of these five constructs for 99% of the stuff that you do. And so, I always wonder, where does that line lie? And how… mappable, is that really more accessible than functor? Or is that only because I was exposed to the concept of mapping for 10 years before I ever heard the F word. BEN: Yes, and yes. I mean, that's… CHARLES: [Laughs] BEN: Things that are more accessible are usually more accessible because of some pre-given knowledge, right? What works in JavaScript probably isn't going to work in Haskell or Scala or something, right? CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: If someone's a Java developer, certain idioms might not make sense to them that come from the JavaScript world. CHARLES: Right. But if I was learning like a student, I would think mappable, I'd be thinking like, I would literally be thinking like Google Maps or something like that. I don't know. BEN: Right, right. I mean, look at C#. C#, a mapping function is always going to be called select, right, because that's C#. That's their idiom for the same thing. CHARLES: Select? BEN: Yeah. CHARLES: Really? BEN: Yeah, select. So, they'll… CHARLES: Which in Ruby is like find. BEN: Yeah. there's select and then, what's the other one, ‘select many' or something like that. [Chuckles] BEN: So, that's C#. CHARLES: Oh, like it's select from SQL. Okay. BEN: Yeah, I think that's kind of where it came from because people had link and then they had link to SQL and then they're like, well I want to do this with regular code, with just using some more… less nuanced expressions. So, I want to be able to do method calls and chain those together. And so, you end up with select functions. And I think that that exists even in Rx.NET, although I haven't used Rx.NET. CHARLES: Hmm, okay. ELRICK: So, I know you do a lot of training with Rx. What are some of the concepts that people struggle with initially? TRACY: I think when we're teaching RX Workshop, a lot of the people sort of… I'll even see senior level people struggle with explaining it, is the difference between observables and observers and then wrapping their head around the idea that, “Hey, observables are just functions in JavaScript.” So, they're always thinking observables are going to do something for you. Actually, it's not just in Angular but also in React, but whenever someone's having issues with their Rx applications, it's usually something that they're like nesting observables or they're not subscribing to something or they've sort of hot-messed themselves into a tangle. And I'm sure you've debugged a bunch of this stuff before. The first thing I always ask people is, “Have you subscribed?” Or maybe they're using an Angular… they're using pipes async but they're also calling ‘dot subscribe' on their observable. BEN: Yeah. So, like in Angular they'll do both. Yeah. There's that. I think that, yeah, that relates to the problem of people not understanding that observables are really just functions. I keep saying that over and over again and people really don't seem to take it to heart for whatever reason. [Chuckles] BEN: But you get an observable and when you're chaining all those operators together, you're making another observable or whatever, observables don't do anything until you subscribe to them. They do nothing. CHARLES: Shouldn't they be called like subscribable? BEN: Yes. [Chuckles] BEN: They probably should. But we do hand them an observer. So, you are observing something. But the point being is that they don't do anything at all until you subscribe to them. And in that regard, they're like functions, where functions don't do anything unless you call them. So, what ends up happening with an observable is you subscribe to it. You give it an observer, three callbacks which are then coerced into an observer. And it takes that observer and it hands it to the body of this observable definition and literally has an observer inside of there. And then you basically execute that function synchronously and do things, whatever those things are, to set up some sort of observation. Maybe you spin up a WebSocket and tie into some events on it and call next on the observer to get values out of your observable. The point being that if you subscribe to an observable twice, it's the same thing as calling a function twice. And for some reason, people have a hard time with that. They think, if I subscribe to the observable twice, I've only called the function once. CHARLES: I experienced this confusion. And I remember the first time that that… like, I was playing with observables and the first time I actually discovered that, that it was actually calling my… now what do you call the function that you pass to the constructor that actually does, that calls next or that gets passed the observer? TRACY: [Inaudible] BEN: I like to call it an initialization function or something. But the official name from the TC39 proposal is subscriber function. CHARLES: Subscriber function. So, like… BEN: Yeah. CHARLES: I definitely remember it was one of those [makes explosion sound] mind-blowing moments when I realized when I call my subscribe method, the entire observable got run from the very beginning. But my intuition was that this is an object. It's got some shared state, like it's this quasar that I'm now observing and I'm seeing the flashes of light coming off of it. But it's still the same object. You think of it as having yeah, not as a function. Okay. No one ever described it to me as just a function. But I think I can see it now. ELRICK: Yeah, me neither. CHARLES: But yeah, you think of it in the same way that most people think of objects, as like, “I have this object. I have a reference to it.” Let observable equal new observable. It's a single thing. It's a single identity. And so, that's the thing that I'm observing. It's not that I'm invoking this observable to observe things. And I think that's, yeah, that's a subtle nuance there. I wish I had taken y'all's course, I guess is what I'm saying. ELRICK: Yeah. BEN: Yeah. Well, I've done a few talks on it. CHARLES: [Laughs] BEN: I always try to tell people, “It's just a function. It's just a function.” I think what happens to a lot of people too is there's the fact that it's an object. But I think what it is, is people's familiarity with promises does this. Because promises are always multicast. They are always “hot”. And the reason for this is because they're eager. So, by the time you have a promise, whatever is producing value to the promise has already started. And that means that they're inherently a multicast. CHARLES: Right. BEN: So, people are used to that behavior of, I can ‘then' off of this promise and it always means one thing. And it's like, yeah, because the one thing has nothing to do with the promise. It wasn't [Chuckles] CHARLES: Right. BEN: This promise is just an interface for you to view something that happened in the past, where an observable is more low-level than that and more simple than that. It just states, “I'm a function that you call. I'm going to be able to do anything a function can do. And by the way, you're giving me an observer and I'm going to do some stuff with that too and notify you via this observer that you handed me.” Because of that you could take an observable and close over something that had already started. Say you had a WebSocket that was already running. You could create a new observable and just like any function, close over that, externally create a WebSocket. And then everyone that subscribes to that observable is tying an observer to that same WebSocket. Then you're multicast. Then you're “hot”. ELRICK: [Inaudible] CHARLES: Right. So, I was going to say that's the distinction that Jay was talking about. He was talking about we're going to just talk about… he said at the very beginning, “We're just going to talk about hot observable.” ELRICK: Yup. CHARLES: But even a hot observable is still theoretically evaluating every single time you subscribe. You're getting a new observable. You're evaluating that observable afresh each time. It just so happens that in the lexical scope of that observable subscriber function, there is this WebSocket? BEN: Yeah. So, it's the same thing. Imagine you wrote a function that when you called it created a new WebSocket and then… say, you wrote a new function that you gave an observer object to, right? An observer object has next, error, and complete. And in that function, when you called it, it created a new WebSocket and then it tied the ‘on message' and ‘on close' and whatever to your observer's next method and your observer's error message and so on. When you call that function, you would expect a new WebSocket to be created every single time. Now, let's just say alternately you create a WebSocket and then you write a new function that that function closes over that WebSocket. So, you reference the WebSocket that you externally created inside of your function. When you call that function, it's not going to create a new WebSocket every time. It's just closing over it, right? So, even though they both are basically doing the same thing, now the latter one of those two things is basically a hot observable and the former is a cold observable. Because one is multicast which is, “I'm sharing this one WebSocket with everybody,” and the other one is unicast which is, “I am going to create a new WebSocket for each person that calls me.” And that's the [inaudible] people have a hard time with. CHARLES: Right. But really, it's just a matter of scope. BEN: Yeah. The thing people have a hard time with, with observables, is not realizing that they're actually just functions. CHARLES: Yeah. I just think that maybe… see, when I hear things like multicast and unicast, that makes me think of shared state, whereas when you say it's just a matter of scope, well then I'm thinking more in terms of it being just a function. It just happens that this WebSocket was already [scoped]. BEN: Well, shared state is a matter of scope, right? CHARLES: Yes, it is. It is. Oh, sorry. Shared state associated with some object identity, right? BEN: Right. CHARLES: But again, again, it's just preconceptions, really. It's just me thinking that I've had to manage lists of listeners and have multicast observers and single-cast observers and having to manage those lists and call notify on all of them. And that's really not what's happening at all. BEN: Yeah. Well, I guess the real point is observables can have shared state or they could not have shared state. I think the most common version and the most composable version of them, they do not have any shared state. It's just one of those things where just like a function can have shared state or it could be pure, right? There's nothing wrong with either one of those two uses of a function. And there's nothing wrong with either one of those two uses of Observable. So, honest to god, that is the biggest stumbling block I think that I see people have. That and if I had to characterize it I would say fear and loathing over the number of operators. People are like… CHARLES: [Chuckles] BEN: And they really think because everyone's used to dealing with these frameworks where there's an idiomatic way to do everything, they think there's going to be an RxJS idiomatic way to do things. And that's just patently false. That's like saying there's an idiomatic way to use functions. There's not. Use it however it works. The end. It's not… CHARLES: Mmhmm, mmhmm. BEN: You don't have to use every operator in a specific way. You can use it however works for you and it's fine. ELRICK: I see that you guys are doing some fantastic work with your documentation. Was that part of RxJS 2.0 docs? TRACY: I was trying to inspire people to take on the docs initiative because I think when I was starting to learn RxJS I would get really frustrated with the docs. BEN: Yeah. TRACY: I think the docs are greatly documented but at the same time if you're not a senior developer who understands Rx already, then it's not really helpful. Because it provides more of a reference point that the guys can go back and look at, or girls. So anyways, after many attempts of trying to get somebody to lead the project I just decided to lead the project myself. [Laughter] TRACY: And try to get… the community is interesting because I think because the docs can be sometimes confusing… Brian Troncone created LearnRxJS.io. There's these other visualization projects like RxMarbles, RxViz, et cetera. And we just needed to stick everybody together. So, it's been a project that I think has been going on for the past two months or so. We have… it's just an Angular app so it's probably one of the most easiest projects to contribute to. I remember the first time I tried to contribute to the Ember docs. It literally took me an hour to sit there with a learning team, Ember Learning Team member and… actually, maybe it was two hours, just to figure out how the heck… like all the things I had to download to get my environment set up so that I could actually even contribute to the darn documentation. But with the Rx, the current RxJS docs right now is just an Angular app. You can pull it down. It's really easy. We even have people who are just working on accessibility, which is super cool, right? So, it's a very friendly place for beginners. BEN: I'm super pleased with all the people that have been working on that. Brian and everybody, especially on the accessibility front. Jen Luker [inaudible] came in and voluntarily… she's like the stopgap for all accessibility to make sure everything is accessible before we release. So, that's pretty exciting. TRACY: Yeah. ELRICK: Mmhmm. TRACY: So funny because when me and Jen started talking, she was talking about something and then I was like, “Oh my god, I'm so excited about the docs.” She's like, “I'm so excited, too! But I don't really know why I'm excited. But you're excited, so I'm excited. Why are you excited?” [Laughter] TRACY: I was like, “I don't know. But I'm excited, too!” [Chuckles] TRACY: And then all of a sudden we have accessibility. [Laughs] ELRICK: Mmhmm. Yeah, I saw some amazing screenshots. Has the new docs, have they been pushed up to the URL yet? TRACY: Nah, they are about to. We were… we want to do one more accessibility run-through before we publish it. And then we're going to document. We want to document the top 15 most viewed operators. But we should probably see that in the next two weeks or so, that the new docs will be… I mean, it'll say “Beta, beta, beta” all over everything. But actually also, some of our friends, [Dmitri] from [Valas] Software, he is working on the translation portion to make it really easy for people to translate the docs. CHARLES: Ah. TRACY: So, a lot of that came from the inspiration from the Vue.js docs. we're taking the versioning examples that Ember has done with their docs as inspiration to make sure that our versioning is really great. So, it's great that we can lend upon all the other amazing ideas in the industry. ELRICK: Oh, yeah. CHARLES: Yeah, it's fantastic. I can't wait to see them. ELRICK: Yeah, me neither. The screenshots look amazing. I was like, “Wow. These are some fabulous documentation that's going to be coming out.” I can't wait. TRACY: Yeah. Thank you. CHARLES: Setting the bar. ELRICK: Really high. [Laughter] CHARLES: Actually, I'm curious. Because observables are so low-level, is there some use of them that… what's the use of them that you found most surprising? Or, “Whoa, this was a crazy hack.” BEN: The weirdest use of observables, there's been quite a few odd ones. One of the ones that I did one time that is maybe in RxJS's wheelhouse, it was just that RxJS already existed. So, I didn't want to pull in another transducer library, was using RxJS as a transducer. Basically… in Netflix we had a situation where we had these huge, huge arrays of very large objects. And if you try to take something like that and then map it and then filter it and then map it and then filter it, we're using Array map and filter, what ends up happening is you create all sorts of intermediary arrays in-memory. And then garbage collection has to come through and clean that up. And that locks your thread. And over time, we were experiencing slowness with this app. And it would just build up until eventually it ground to a halt. And I used RxJS because it was an available tool there to wrap these arrays in an observable and then perform operations on them step-by-step, the same map, filter, and so on. But when you do that, it doesn't create intermediary arrays because it passes each value along step to step instead of producing an entire array and then doing another step and producing an entire array, and so on. So… CHARLES: So, will you just… BEN: It saved garbage collection and it increased the performance of the app. But that's just in an extreme case. I would never do that with just regular arrays. If anything, it was because it was huge, huge arrays of very large objects. CHARLES: So, you would create an observable our of the array and then just feed each element into the observable one at a time? BEN: Well, no. If you say ‘observable from' and you give it an array, that's basically what it does. CHARLES: Okay. BEN: It loops over the array and nexts those values out of the array synchronously. CHARLES: I see, I see. BEN: So, it's like having a for loop and then inside of that for loop saying, “Apply the map. Apply the filter,” whatever, to each value as they're going through. But when you look at it, if you had array map, filter, reduce, it's literally just taking the first step and saying ‘observable from' and wrapping that array and then the rest of it's still the same. CHARLES: Right. Yeah. No, that's really cool. BEN: That was a weirder use of it. I've heard tell of other things where people used observables to do audio synchronization, which is pretty interesting. Because you have to be very precise with audio synchronization. So, hooking into some of the Web Audio APIs and that sort of thing. That's pretty interesting. The WebSocket multiplexing is something I did at Netflix that's a little bit avant-garde for observable use because you essentially have an observable that is your WebSocket. And then you create another observable that closes over that observable and sends messages over the WebSocket for what you're subscribed to and not subscribed to. And it enables you to very easily retry connections and these sorts of things. I did a whole talk on that. That one's pretty weird. CHARLES: Yeah. Man, I [inaudible] to see that. BEN: But in the general use case, you click a button, you make an AJAX request, and then you get that back and maybe you make another AJAX request. Or like drag and drop and these sorts of things where you're coordinating multiple events together, is the general use case. The non-weird use case for RxJS. Tracy does weird stuff with RxJS though. [Laughter] CHARLES: Yeah, what's some weird uses of RxJS? TRACY: I think my favorite thing to do right now is to figure out how many different IoT-related things I can make work with RxJS. So, how many random things can I connect to an application using that? BEN: Tracy's projects are the best. They're so good. [Laughter] TRACY: Well, Ben and I created an application where you can take pictures of things using the Google Image API and it'll spit back a set of puns for you. So, you take a picture of a banana, it'll give you banana puns. Or you can talk to it using the speech recognition API. My latest thing is I really want to figure out how to… I haven't figured out if Bluetooth Low Energy is actually enabled on Google Home Minis. But I want to get my Google Home Mini to say ‘booty'. [Inaudible] [Laughter] CHARLES: RxJS to the rescue. [Laughter] BEN: Oh, there was, you remember Ng-Cruise. We did Ng-Cruise and on there, Alex Castillo brought… TRACY: Oh, that was so cool. BEN: All sorts of interesting… you could read your brain waves. Or there was another one that was, what is it, the Microsoft, that band put around your wrist that would sense what direction your arm was in and whether or not your hand was flexed. And people… TRACY: Yeah, so you could flip through things. BEN: Yeah. And people were using reactive programming with that to do things like grab a ball on the screen. Or you could concentrate on an image and see if it went blurry or not. ELRICK: Well, for like, Minority Report. BEN: Oh, yeah, yeah. Literally, watching a machine read your mind with observables. That was pretty cool. That's got to be the weirdest. TRACY: Yeah, or we had somebody play the piano while they were wearing one of the brainwave… it's called the OpenBCI project is what it is. And what you can do is you can actually get the instructions to 3D print out your own headset and then buy the technology that allows you to read brain waves. And so with that, it's like… I mean, it was really awesome to watch her play the piano and just see how her brain waves were going super crazy. But there's also these really cool… I don't know if you guys have heard of Jewelbots, but they're these programmable friendship bracelets that are just little Arduino devices that light up. I have two of them. I haven't even opened them. CHARLES: [Laughs] TRACY: I've been waiting to play with them with you. I don't know what we're going to do, but I just want to send you lights. Flashing lights. [Laughter] TRACY: Morse code ask you questions about RxJS while you're working. [Laughter] CHARLES: Yeah. Critical bug. Toot-toot-toot-too-too-too-too-toot-toot. [Laughter] CHARLES: RxJS Justice League. TRACY: That would actually be really fun. [Laughter] TRACY: That would be really fun. I actually really want to do that. But… CHARLES: I'm sure the next time we talk, you will have. TRACY: [Laughs] Yes. Yes, yes, yes, I know. I know. we'll do it soon. We just need to find some time while we're not going crazy with conferences and stuff like that. CHARLES: So, before we head out, is there any upcoming events, talks, releases, anything that we ought to be, we or the listeners, ought to be aware of? TRACY: Yeah, so one of the things is that Ben and I this weekend actually just recorded the latest version of RX Workshop. So, if you want to learn all about the latest, latest, newest new, you can go ahead and take that course. We go through a lot of different things like multiplex WebSockets, building an application. Everywhere from the fundamentals to the more real world implementations of RxJS. BEN: Yeah. Even in the fundamentals area, we've had friends of ours that are definitely seasoned Rx veterans come to the workshop. And most of them ask the most questions while talking about the fundamentals. Because I tend to dig into, either deep into the internals or into the why's and how's thing. Why and how things work. Even when it comes to how to subscribe to an observable. Deep detailed information about what happens if you don't provide an error handler and certain cases and how that's going to change in upcoming versions, and why that's changing in upcoming versions, and what the TC39's thoughts are on that, and so on and so forth. So, I try to get into some deeper stuff and we have a lot of fun. And we tend to be a little goofier at the workshops from time to time than we were in this podcast. Tracy and I get silly when we're together. TRACY: It's very true. [Laughter] TRACY: But I think also, soon I think there are people that are going to be championing an Observable proposal on what [inaudible]. So, aside from the TC39 Observable proposal that's currently still at stage one, I don't know Ben if you want to talk a little bit about that. BEN: Oh, yeah. So, I've been involved in conversations with folks from Netflix and Google as well, Chrome team and TC39 members, about getting the WHATWG, the ‘what wig', they're a standards body similar to W3C, to include observables as part of the DOM. The post has not been made yet. But the post is going to be made soon as long as everybody's okay with it. And what it boils down to is the idea of using observables as part of event targets. An event target is the API we're all familiar with for ‘add event listener', ‘remove event listener'. So, pretty much anywhere you'd see those methods, there might also someday be an on method that would return an observable of events. So, it's really, really interesting thing because it would bring at least the primitives of reactive programming to the browser. And at the very least it would provide maybe a nicer API for people to subscribe to events coming from different DOM elements. Because ‘add event listener' and ‘remove event listener' are a little unergonomic at times, right? CHARLES: Yeah. They're the worst. BEN: Yeah. CHARLES: That's a very polite way of putting it. BEN: [Chuckles] So, that's one thing that's coming down the pipe. Other things, RxJS 6 is in the works. We recently tied off 5.5 in a stable branch. And master is now our alpha that we're working on. So, there's going to be a lot of refactoring and changes there, trying to make the library smaller and smaller. And trying to eliminate some of the footprints that maybe people had in previous versions. So, moving things around so people aren't importing stuff that were meant to be implementation details, reducing the size of the library, trying to eliminate some bloat, that sort of thing. I'm pretty excited about that. But that's going to be in alpha ongoing for a while. And then hopefully we'll be able to move into beta mid first quarter next year. And then when that'll be out of beta, who knows? It all depends on how well people like the beta and the alpha, right? CHARLES: Alright. Well, so if folks do want to follow up with y'all either in regards to the course or to upcoming releases or any of the other great stuff that's coming along, how would they get in touch with y'all? TRACY: You can find me on Twitter @ladyleet. But Ben is @BenLesh. RX Workshop is RXWorkshop.com. I think in January we're going to be doing state of JavaScript under This Dot Media again. So, that's where all the core contributors of different frameworks and libraries come together. So, we'll definitely be giving a state of RxJS at that time. And next year also Contributor Days will be happening. So, if you go to ContributorDays.com you can see the previous RxJS Contributor Days and figure out how to get involved. So, we're always open and happy and willing to teach everybody. And again, if you want to get involved it doesn't matter whether you have little experience or lots of experience. We are always willing to show you how you can play. BEN: Yeah. You can always find us on Twitter. And don't forget that if you don't find Tracy or I on Twitter, you can always message Jay Phelps on Twitter. That's important. @_JayPhelps. Really. TRACY: Yeah. [Laughter] BEN: You'll find us. CHARLES: [Chuckles] Look for Jay in the show notes. [Laughter] CHARLES: Alright. Well, thank you so much for all the stuff that y'all do, code and otherwise. And thank you so much Ben, thank you so much Tracy, for coming on the show. BEN: Thank you. CHARLES: Bye Elrick and bye everybody. If you want to reach out to us, you can always get in touch with us at @TheFrontside or send us an email at contact@frontside.io. Alright everybody, we'll see you next week.
过去几年里白领拳击人气越来越高,对于日常工作压力极大的都市白领而言,拳击是不仅是一种发泄,更是一种锻炼身体与精神专注力,以及释放压力的一种的生活方式。 完整文稿请上我们今天的微信(搜索英语环球 NEWSPlus)看去~ White collar boxing is punching ahead in Taiwan. In Taipei hundreds of guests attend a glitzy black tie gala dinner - while their friends and work colleagues prepare to enter the boxing ring. Guests are arriving in their black ties and formal gowns. The sound of people chatting and clinking champagne glasses can be heard throughout the hotel lobby. But down the hallway, the atmosphere is very different. Men in their 20s to 40s are wrapping up their fists, putting on shoes, and warming up their bodies. It might look like preparations for a standard boxing match, but the men getting ready to fight are the friends and work colleagues of those here to watch the show. This is the first white collar boxing night in Taipei. People who generally work in offices train for a few months to box in front of an audience. The fighters have no previous boxing experience and tonight they are fighting in front of 500 people who have paid up to 200 US dollars to attend. Shane Benis, the event organiser from China Sports Promotions, says lots of people are attracted to boxing, but are reluctant to give it a go. "What we do is we take the ballroom environment, the gala setting, we get businessmen and women to train. Most people, a lot of people are interested in learning boxing. The hesitancy for normal businessman or woman is actually getting punched in the face than actually having a fight. But once they overcome that barrier and they actually say okay, I am going to do this." Benis says organising matches for these amateurs to fight in a gala dinner environment makes it more fun for their friends and families to attend. White collar boxing started more than ten years ago in a New York gym. Since then several organisers have hosted events in many cities where traders and brokers, teachers and celebrities, swap their normal clothes for boxing kit and get into the ring. Originally 26 working men and women signed up for training for the Taipei Fight Night. 14 have been chosen to pair up for 7 fights. Guth Wang, a 28-year-old businessman, is one of tonight's fighters. For the last three months, Guth has trained almost every day after finishing his day job running a family business. Guth admits that he is extremely nervous about the fight, but says the challenge that he has set himself will do him good, physically and mentally. In the end, Guth loses to his opponent Brian Lee after completing three of the two-minute rounds. But for him, the experience is still worthwhile. "I am feeling good and happy, I have done my best. It was a tight match. I was so close to winning the fight," he says. Shawn McClelland is a Taipei-based investor and the oldest fighter among the boxers in this group. The 49-year-old American expatriate has lost over 10 pounds through training and now faces a younger and taller opponent. His knee gives in during the second round, but Shawn's hits prove to be more accurate and he wins the match by points, to his own surprise. "Mostly I want to set a challenge for myself, you know, to see how you actually measure up against someone else as supposed to just lifting the weights in the gym. I think everybody wants to get fit but it's hard sometimes if you don't have a clear-cut goal and nothing like boxing in front of five hundreds of your close personal friends to really make you focused and try to accomplish your goal." According to China Sports Promotions, all 500 tickets for the five-course champagne gala dinner are sold out. The company has held similar events in Beijing, Shanghai and Macao and hope to expand to other cities including Hong Kong and Bangkok in the next year.
Tonight's special guest is Kelli Benis from Alberta, Canada, a survivor of sexual abuse and the author of the new book "Shredding the Shame: Healing Childhood Abuse." Kelli was born in Calgary, Alberta and grew up in Lethbridge, Alberta, where she currently lives. Raised by loving parents, she was the younger of two children and was sexually abused by her grandfather from the age of four until twelve. Cloaked in the silence of shame, she kept her secret for twenty years before she was able to find the courage to tell her immediate family in an effort to ensure her children would not be exposed to her abuser. It would be another twenty years before Benis was able to tell her story to the world—fuelled by the inspiration provided by attending the Victor Walk on May 23, 2013 on the steps of Parliament Hill with Theo Fleury, the former NHL player who is also a survivor of childhood abuse. Benis is passionate about inspiring others to come forward and find their voices in the hope of raising awareness about this issue, which thrives in an atmosphere of silence. She continues to seek out opportunities to share her story so that others may also enjoy living their lives free from the shackles of shame. She is motivated by the heartfelt belief that the more we connect with each other through our adversities and support each other in overcoming them, the more connected we will be as a community. As the Amazon.com web site says of her book, "Finding her voice in a refusal to allow a painful past to hinder her future, she became determined to inspire others to do the same," and notes that Kelli, "savors the freedom of ending the secrecy and elevates the conversation to inspire the other '1 in 3 females' and '1 in 6 males' to take steps towards healing and empowerment."